


The Devil's Work

by Beguile



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Ableist Language, Blood, Captivity, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, H/C bingo, Hurt/Comfort, Psychological Torture, Sarcasm, Some Swearing, Torture, Violence, dark humour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-08
Updated: 2015-09-20
Packaged: 2018-04-08 09:46:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 25,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4300092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beguile/pseuds/Beguile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Matt and Foggy are captured by some underworld cronies looking to catch the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.  The irony of the situation is not lost on them.  They’re just sorry they can’t let their captors know that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.
> 
> This is based off of a kinkmeme prompt sent to me by drewbug looking for Matt and Foggy being tortured, with Foggy having to take care of Matt during captivity AND Matt having to listen to Foggy being hurt. I can’t find the original prompt anymore, so if you know where I need to share this, please let me know!
> 
> This fic will be multi-chapter – I’m thinking about 6-8, but I can’t be sure until I get to the end. More characters will make an appearance as it goes. I didn’t post it in Just in Case because there ended up being so much material I wanted to include. I do include humour, which stands in contrast to and seems inappropriate in a fic about torture, and I felt like an apology might maybe be in order. Sorry for offending or disturbing anyone.
> 
> Readers, you’re my favourites. Thank you so much for your kind support. I hope you enjoy!

* * *

 

One

 

            The ringing in his head dulls from chrome to pewter before he can hear Foggy hissing his name, “Matt!  Matt!  Wake up!”  His chair jostles causing a web of pain to spring to life in his chest.  There’s a dull ache on his left side accompanied by the smell of burnt flesh: stun gun.  Administered, no doubt, by one of the three strangers hovering in an adjacent room.

            Matt jumps off his seat but doesn’t make it very far.  His wrists and ankles are wrapped in rope, so there’s no way he can tear them free.  “Please tell me you were trained in escape artistry,” Foggy begs quietly from behind him.  Evidently, they’re both in the same position, forcefully seated back-to-back.

            The perspiration on his wrists is only causing the rope to stick, and gradually, the hopelessness of their situation starts to overpower his initial rush of adrenaline.  He isn’t strong enough to break the ropes or free himself; his muscles still feel the effects of the stun gun.  “Sorry, Foggy,” he whispers, slumping into his seat.  “Give me a minute.”

            More burnt flesh smell; Foggy didn’t come quietly either.  “Take your time.  We’re not going anywhere,” Foggy even gives his bonds a try for a second.  Nothing.  Just more jostling and rocking of chairs. 

            The motion makes Matt’s stomach roll.  His head is pounding dully.  Neither are typically effects from a stun gun; he’s been drinking.  In fact, he seems to remember having drinks at Josie’s before someone sticks his memory in an electrical socket and fries a few important details away.  Things like how he ended up with Foggy in a decrepit metal building.  The air thick with rusted metal and rotting wood.  Waves crashing against the foundation of ever-weakening supports.  Matt shifts focus to something less nauseating.

            “There’s three of them,” he latches onto their conversation.  Every other word is too muted, even for his ears, but a few details emerge.  One wears the smoke of at least a carton of cigarettes and a collection of rings in place of brass knuckles.  Another has a patient heartbeat to match his world-weariness.  Two captives in an abandoned warehouse is just another Friday night for him.  He speaks in an unmistakeable baritone.  Lastly, there’s the hummingbird heartbeat of some young, dumb thing.  A potentially dangerous mix of scared, excited, and nervous. 

            “Watch out for Cigarettes,” Matt hisses, “he’s got a temper, and even though he’s not the boss, he won’t hesitate to take a swing at one or both of us.”  
  
            Foggy’s heartbeat was steady before.  Now it’s a death rattle.  “How will I know which one is Cigarettes?”  
  
            “You’ll know.”  
  
            That’s not the answer he wants.  “Damn it, Matt, I don’t think any of our _kidnappers_ are going to hesitate to take a swing at us.”  
  
            “One will.  Big guy.  Been in the business a long time.”

            “Are you making this up?”  
  
            “Would you just listen to me?” the guys in the next room certainly are.  Their conversation stops, and then there are footsteps thundering in Matt and Foggy’s direction.  “Just say calm.”  
  
            “I am calm.”  
  
            “You’re not calm.”  
  
            If Foggy’s hands weren’t bound, he’d be throwing punches, “Stop. Listening. To. My. Heart.”

            The trio comes to a halt nearby and takes a stance in a straight line.  “Nice of you to join us, gentlemen,” Baritone greets them.  “You especially, Mr. Murdock.  You nearly got the upper hand on us for a minute there.  Not bad for a blind guy.”

            Matt can smell sweat and blood underneath the fog of cigarette smoke clouding Baritone’s associate.  “I must be have an off night,” he tells them. 

            “Must be.  Not every night you end up tied to a chair, I bet.”

            “Not since college,” Matt can feel the ropes biting into his wrists.  Blood might give him the ability to slip a hand free if he can get the skin to break.  He starts gradually tensing his bicep, willing his skin to break. 

            Bariton doesn’t notice.  He starts taking a nice, intimidating walk around his two captives, “Look, gentlemen, I’m not going to lie: this really isn’t the way we like to do business.  So let’s just all do each other some favours and work together, okay?  You give us the information we need, we let you go back to you night.  Sound good?”  
  
            His Brooklyn accent is muted, but Matt catches it on a couple of syllables.  Helpful information in case the guy gives them the slip later.  His heartbeat’s really steady too, giving Matt some hope that they might survive this if they play their cards right.  Baritone’s not pretending to be reasonable; he’s been in the business long enough that time is a valuable ally.  Matt nudges Foggy, “Yeah, that sounds good.”  
  
            “Sounds perfect,” Foggy overcompensates.  His heart rate starts to trickle into a more manageable rhythm. 

            “Good,” Baritone circles back to his friends.  Down to business then.  “We understand that you have a relationship with the masked vigilante called Daredevil.”  
  
            Foggy’s heart goes back to a worrying speed.  Matt takes over, “He has been known to drop in on members of our office from time to time.”  
  
            “He saved your secretary’s life,” Cigarettes snaps. 

            “Yeah, once,” Foggy snaps back. 

            Matt jostles his chair against Foggy’s.  He needs a little time to get out of his chair.  They are never getting out of this if Foggy insists on torqueing up their most torquable captor.

            Thankfully, Baritone isn’t in the mood for conducting violence just yet, “Look, we just want to know if you’ve had any contact with him recently.  Where, when, what he looked like, why he was interested: that kind of thing.  You help us, we’ll help you.”  
  
            Matt’s glad to start seeing blood on his bonds.  Baritone’s a bad liar.  There’s absolutely no reason to go to all these lengths to pump people for information. 

            Foggy runs distraction, “So the information has to be useful for you to let us go?”  
  
            Baritone’s leather jacket scrunches when he shrugs.  Matt can hear the small snap of a shoulder holster as he moves.  He, at least, has a gun.  “Correct.”  
  
            “How do you define useful?” Foggy asks.  “What constitutes useful information?”  
  
            “Look, smartass,” Cigarettes takes a thundering step towards them and shoves a finger into Foggy’s face.  His other hand is balled into a fist.  “Stop dicking around and tell us what we want to know?”  
  
            “I just want to be as cooperative as possible,” Foggy insists. 

            “You’re looking to be as annoying as possible!”  
  
            “I’m not the one making unreasonable demands with the two guys I’ve just _take hostage_.”

            Matt’s hand slips a little further under the rope.  He prays Foggy can keep them talking instead of punching for a few seconds more.

            Baritone helps without even realizing it.  He grabs Cigarettes and drags it back.  He’s interested, a little offended even, “What do you mean, unreasonable?”  
  
            Foggy takes a deep breath, gets himself under control.  When he speaks, he sounds like his usual self: calm, cool, collected.  “You’re offering to let us go only if we give you useful information, but there’s no way for us to know if the information we’ve given you is useful.”  
  
            “He makes a good point,” the new guy – Scrawny?  No, Squirrelly.  He’s way too scared to make good decisions, and his voice is at least two pitches higher than his cohorts.  He’s a kid.  Just some dumb kid.  “How do we know these guys are giving us the good stuff?”

            “What the hell is the matter with you?” the question’s undirected, and it has every right to be.  There’s no limit to the level of crazy in this cadre.  To Foggy and Matt: “Do you two speak English?”

            “Worse,” Foggy says apologetically, “We’re lawyers.”  
  
            “I told you we should have gone for the secretary,” Cigarettes mutters.   
  
            Baritone, to his credit, really tries to be diplomatic about all this, but his mouth says one thing while his heart says another, “If the information you provide can help us catch…”

            “We’re not here to give you information,” Matt says.  He turns what little he can towards Foggy.  “We’re bait.  The information is just to buy you time for the Daredevil to show up.”

            Now that he’s caught in a lie, Baritone isn’t so patient.  His temperature creeps up slowly, along with his pulse, and it takes a moment for him to ask, “What makes you say that?”  
  
            “Nobody goes to all this trouble just for information.  We’re hostages.”

            “Hostages don’t have to be treated badly,” damn it, he’s good.  Baritone’s heartbeat only climbs a little from his very blatant lie.

            Matt wishes he paid closer attention earlier.  He thought Cigarettes was going to be the problem.  His hand slips even more deeply under the ropes, almost free.  He just has to keep them talking a minute more, “Hostages never get treated well.”

            Baritone huffs and comes over to stand by Matt, who manages to shove his bloody hand back into his bonds before he gets caught.  “I can treat hostages very well, when there’s an incentive.  You got an incentive for me, Matt?”  
   
           He can’t resist the urge to smile.  His wrist is so slick with blood that he knows, without testing, he can get his hand free.  There’s not much he can do right now with one hand, but it’s a start.  Matt smirks, “I don’t know anything about the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.”  
  
            Foggy is eerily, unerringly calm, “Neither do I.”

            “Hm,” Baritone paces back over to his associates.  “That’s a shame.  Now, I get to the part of my job I don’t like.”

            “Oh, yeah?  What’s that?” Foggy demands, still mostly sounding badass.

            Baritone’s smile is audible, “We get to find out which of you two the Devil likes better.”

            Cigarettes is only too happy to clarify for the lawyers, “That’s whichever one of you two screams the loudest.” 

 

* * *

 

unHappy reading!

           

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.
> 
> Some of the language Foggy and his captors use in this chapter is ableist. It is being used deliberately on Foggy’s part within the context of the chapter in an effort to play with his captor’s expectations. Please let me know if it doesn’t work or is offensive and I will edit accordingly. 
> 
> I was overwhelmed by the positive response to the first chapter of this fic! Thank you, readers, for your kind support. I do hope you continue to enjoy this fic (as much as one can, given the focus of the storytelling).  
> Have a wonderful day!

* * *

Two 

           “Me,” Foggy declares, “I’m the better screamer.  I volunteer as tribute.”  
  
            Matt doesn’t let Foggy say another word.  He can already tell Baritone’s mind is made up.  “He doesn’t know what he’s saying,” Matt interjects.  “Foggy is a terrible candidate for torture.”  
  
            “That’s not true.  I am way more susceptible to torture than Matt is.”  
  
            Which is precisely the problem, and not because Foggy will reveal his secret.  Matt’s pretty sure these gents won’t believe him if he tried.  No, the problem is Foggy doesn’t know how to manage pain, harness it, and wield it.  He’s never had to deal with pain, let alone calculated, increasing increments.  Matt deals with pain on a night constant basis.  He’s made it his lifelong education.  He can handle this.

            More importantly, he is not going to let them lay a finger on Foggy.  “He’s not more susceptible.  Hard life, this one.  Take me instead.”  
  
            Foggy tries to jab him with an elbow and ends up just bashing their chairs together.  The ring of rusted metal gives Matt hope that the seats can be easily broken. 

            “Matthew,” Foggy warns him. 

            Matt forces the chairs to knock together again.  There’s definitely weak spots in the metal, places where the vibrations sound just a little flat.  “Franklin.”

            Their captors have absolutely nothing to contribute.  Squirrelly seems particularly mortified.  His mouth flaps open and shut a few times as he tries to comprehend the scene.  Baritone and Cigarettes take the negotiations in stride.  Apparently, people have argued over who would be a better victim before. 

            Cigarettes takes Matt’s side, “My money’s on the small one.”  
  
            Foggy tosses his head, not at all finished with this debate, “Oh, sure.  Torture the blind guy.”  
  
            “It’s torture,” Matt reassures Cigarettes, trying to keep the big guy’s attention off Foggy.  “It’s already unethical.” 

            “Do you really want to be the one who tortured a blind guy?” Foggy keeps going.  “You think your criminal buddies are going to be all impressed by you hurting someone who can’t see?  No offence, Matt.”

            “Some taken,” Matt admits. 

            Foggy decides to deal with that apology at another time.  He addresses Cigarettes again with as much derision in his voice as he can muster, “What kind of a sick monster are you?”

            Matt is surprised when Cigarettes’s heart beat starts into a worry rhythm.  The stakes just got personal for him.  Squirrelly voices the concerns perfectly, “Yeah, I don’t know if I can do a blind guy.”

            The attention’s all on Foggy, who is about to seal the deal with closing arguments.  Matt beats him to the punch.  “If you think about it, blindness really heightens the effects of torture.  I’m almost guaranteed to break.”

            Cigarettes is back on his side.  He pops his knuckles in the pocket of his coat.

            Foggy isn’t letting this go though, “He grew up blind in Hell’s Kitchen.  He’s unbreakable.  I’m the one you want.”   

            “The small one always breaks first,” Matt offers, thinking about how satisfying it’s going to be when he breaks Squirrelly’s face with his fist. 

            As if he can hear the thoughts in Matt’s head, Foggy grows even more emphatic, “HE’S A TOTAL BADASS.  I’M A STICK OF BUTTER.  Torture me!  I bruise and cry!”

            Matt scoffs.  Baritone’s nervous at the thought; he can smell it.  “Do you really want a crier on your hands?”

            Foggy ups the ante, “I also promise that I won’t break for a satisfactory amount of time.”  
  
            There’s so much Matt wants to say and can’t: shut up, Foggy.  I can do this, Foggy.  You don’t need to protect me.  He tries to tap it out in morse code with the chairs, but all he does is create a sad, tinny song to fill the prolonged quiet. 

            The leg strapped to his left ankle is the weakest.  If he keeps at it, he can break it.

            “Both of you said you didn’t know anything,” Baritone says, waving a hand between them to dismiss both their arguments. 

            “Oh, we don’t,” Foggy replies, “but you don’t seem to be buying that.”  
  
            Matt sees his advantage and takes it, “He doesn’t know anything.”  
  
            Cigarettes enters the fray, “You said you didn’t know anything either!”

            “I don’t, but again, you don’t seem to be buying that.”  
  
            Squirrelly loses it, “What the hell are we even talking about?”

            “They were arguing about who was better to torture,” Baritone states.

            “I am,” Matt and Foggy say at the same time.

            “So why don’t you two just tell us what we want to know!” Muscles demands.

            Baritone knows.  He’s had this all figured out from the beginning, but the inertia of the argument kept him from putting a stop to it.  He finally puts it into words, “Because they’re protecting each other.  Nelson and Murdock, attorneys at law.  You guys must be hell for prosecutors.”

            “We do our best,” Matt gets back to business.  “Leave Foggy alone.  You want someone to hurt, take me.”

            Baritone likes the sound of that.  Decisiveness appeals to him.  “The man wants to get hurt.  Let’s oblige him.”  
  
            “Hey, I want to get hurt!” Foggy shouts.  He starts rocking his chair in the direction of their attackers.

            He’s ignored.  Cigarettes comes over and grabs Matt’s armrest, hauling him away.  The chair legs screech and scratch at deafening pitches along the floor.  Matt focuses past the sting on his ear drums to the reverb in the room, mapping the walls, the windows, the doors.  There’s an awful lot of metal around him.  Small enough pieces to use as weapons.  The floor is weakest a few feet from where he and Foggy were sitting. 

            He shifts so that his weight is directly over the left leg and makes sure it catches on every floorboard.  The vibrations of sound get tighter and tighter as it drags.   

            Foggy continues to struggle, but his ropes are giving him problems.  Sticking when they should be slipping, tightening when they should be loosening.  Matt tries to reassure him, “We’re going to be okay, Foggy.”  
  
            They’re not.  Baritone knows it, as does Cigarettes, but they keep their mouths shut.  Holding onto a fool’s hope is the worst king of torture. 

* * *

 

            The heaps of damp lumber muffle the noise, but Matt knows the ceiling’s high enough that the sound will travel.  He can still hear Foggy struggling in his seat, muttering all kinds of oaths and threats towards their captors.  Baritone’s professional enough to let that kind of thing slide; he’s saving his offence for later, when it’s Foggy sitting in the stacks of lumber.  Cigarettes sounds worked up, but Matt can’t tell if that’s from Foggy or from dragging him one hundred paces to the right.

            Along the way, Matt got a good feel for the place.  It’s a devil’s sweetest dream and worst nightmare.  Plenty of places to hide, skulk, and stalk, provided the decrepit building doesn’t give him away.  He tests the chair leg.  It gives a little as he kicks, but a few more blows are needed before he can snap it.  Maybe they’ll skip the little stuff for a few good punches.  Maybe he can compel them that a beating is what he needs. 

            Another chair materializes, scratching across the floorboards.  It’s not in much better shape than Matt’s.  The taste of rusty saltwater floods Matt’s mouth, followed by the sharp hint of alcohol from Baritone’s cologne.

            Baritone pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, taps one loose, offers it.  Matt pretends not to notice.  He’s too busy taking in his surroundings, making mental notes, before the smoke clouds his perception. 

            “Hey,” Squirrelly says from where he’s ducking behind a stack of rotting wooden planks.  The tension is getting to be too much for him.  “You want a cigarette?”  
  
            “No, thanks,” Matt replies, lips curling into a wicked snarl.  He sees an advantage and takes it: “I’d rather not get used as my own ashtray.”  
  
            Squirrelly’s blood drains out of his face.  He really doesn’t know what’s going to happen.  Good, Matt decides as he sets and rests his jaw, loosening his facial muscles to keep from gritting his teeth.  That’ll make it easier to play with his expectations. 

            Baritone strikes a match and lights up.  So does Cigarettes.  The waft of sulfur almost makes Matt vomit.  Squirrelly passes on a smoke, shaking so hard that his vibrations sound right through the dense wave of poison crashing hard against Matt.  He can still perceive the room through the noxious fumes.  Matt thinks he might not shatter the kid’s cheekbones later out of thanks. 

            The smoke builds up like so many sheets of rawhide on top of him, gradually tightening.  Matt’s sinuses smolder and ignite.  He wishes he still had his sunglasses so they don’t see him tearing up from the pain. 

            “You know they used to call matches lucifers,” Baritone says to no one in particular.  He takes another drag, blows the smoke directly into Matt’s face.  On the outside, Matt barely reacts.  Inside, he reels from the blow as he would a punch.  The fire has spread to his throat. 

            He doesn’t mean to jump but can’t help himself.  Baritone’s fingers are at his throat, loosening his tie and tugging the collar of his shirt open.  Matt hates that he didn’t feel it coming.  He’s getting too focused on the fire draining through his nose and mouth into his chest.  Suffocation feels imminent as his head starts spinning anew. 

            The hot, smoky air strikes the exposed flesh over his collarbones and crawls over his skin like army ants.  Matt forces himself to breathe, to think, to act.  He slowly draws his bloody hand into the ropes over his wrist, kicks his left leg to weaken the chair.  Let them say what they want and do what they want, because they are rank amateurs when it comes to pain.  They don’t know anything about pain.  Not yet. 

            Baritone takes another long drag before his heart beat can really pick up.  Matt recognizes a tell when he sees it.  Baritone’s getting excited.  This is a comfortable prologue to a horrifying future.  Matt shoves his hand back into the ropes and waits.  Cigarettes isn’t moving, neither is Squirrelly.  Another cloud of smoke slams into his face, but through the prickling heat, Matt picks up on the red hot ember of Baritone’s still smoldering cigarette.  He tracks it on a path from lips through the air before landing on the flesh just below his collarbone. 

            More smoke fills the air, this time loaded with the smell of burning meat.  Matt keeps his physical reaction to a bare minimum.  He clenches the armrests of his chair so hard he thinks the metal might break.  He can hear his neck muscles snap tight under his skin.  Inside, his whole body is screaming.  The world on fire goes to white as his ears ring from the sizzle.  He feels the burn in different layers of skin, keeps count even, because the fire blazes inside him long after the cigarette goes out.     

            He uses his agony to covertly twitch and pull at the chair leg.  One leg and one arm aren’t the best odds, but he can definitely get his hand on Baritone’s gun from this distance. So long as Cigarettes doesn't joinin the fight.

            “Matches used to be people’s own little personal devils,” Baritone flicks away his extinguished cigarette.  “Now there’s just a guy in a mask.  Can you think of anything important about your personal devil?”

            He almost doesn’t hear.  Listening to the chair is drowning out the sounds of everything else.  Matt swallows his urge to vomit from the smell and answers, “He wears a mask and travels at night.”

            The next burn he can’t track.  Cigarettes moves too fast for that.  Two steps and he’s there, using Matt’s chest for an ash tray, almost causing him to fall backwards in his seat.  Cigarettes says something, but Matt’s beyond hearing.  His senses are all focused on the tiny pool of hell next to his sternum, the one that sucks what little air he had in his lungs and makes his arms rattle uncontrollably. 

            When he snaps out of the fugue, Matt finds himself surrounded by a bustle of activity.  Squirrelly’s on the move, roving the small area for something.  “It’s his fucking eyes, man,” Squirrelly says.  “They’re freaking me the hell out!  I told you I didn’t want to do the blind guy!”  
  
            “You should have picked me!  I don’t do freaky things!” Foggy shouts from what sounds like another world.  “No offence, Matt!”  
  
            “A lot taken,” Matt gasps.  Fresh air takes good against his soldered mouth, throat, and lungs.  He drinks it in like a dying man and wills the burning on his chest to subside.

            “SHUT UP,” Cigarettes shouts.  He’s about to say more, wants to by the sounds of his heart, but there’s nothing to say but more threats that Foggy will happily accept. 

            Baritone, ever the manager, keeps everyone under control.  “He’ll get his turn,” he tells Cigarettes.  Then, to Squirrelly, “You think this is freaky?  We haven’t started yet.  He’s gonna do worse things as the night goes on.”  
  
            “Why are we even doing this?  He says he doesn’t know anything.”  
  
            “And you believe that?”  Cigarettes fingers wrap around the open collar of Matt’s shirt and yanks him up until his feet don’t touch the ground.  The left chair leg is very, very loose.  He could kick it free from here, take out Cigarettes, grab the gun…

            Matt heaves a shuddering breath.  That story ends with Squirrelly telling anyone who’ll listen about the blind guy who knows martial arts, the one with loose connections to a known vigilante.  The cops’ll connect the dots on that pretty quick.  Nope, he’s got to play this one as safely as possible.  Make it all look like an accident.  Give himself some plausible deniability. 

            “The kid here thinks you’re telling the truth, that we should just let you go,” Cigarettes’s smell gives Matt a dry cough, one that reverberates through his whole chest from the smoke.  Cigarettes laughs.  He lifts Matt a little higher and drives a pinky into the new burn on his chest.  “What do you say?  Do we let you go?  Talk to your friend for a little bit instead?”  
  
            Matt finds his line in the sand then and there.  They touch Foggy, it’s over.  He kills them.  It won’t matter, then, whether they find out he’s the devil.  “Bind my eyes,” he tells Cigarettes, “and get a handle on that kid before he blows your whole operation.”  
  
            “You sound like you’ve done this before,” Baritone observes.  He’s gone quiet and curious suddenly, as if the pieces of a puzzle are starting to fall into place.

            “I’ve defended this before,” Matt growls.  He tucks his left leg slightly, causing the chair to keel discretely.  No one notices.  At least no one sounds like they notice.  Baritone’s not convinced, but at least he’s not pondering the potential for Matt to lead some kind of double life.  Matt shoots a pointed gaze at Cigarettes’s heaving chest, “You gonna put me down so we can get on with this?”  
  
            He hits just the right tone to cut Cigarettes’s ego, and the result is perfect.  Cigarettes throws Matt back to the ground.  The chair leg hits on its odd angle.  Matt bends his leg at the knee.  There’s a snap of rusty metal, a scratch on his inner thigh, and then the floor rushes up to meet him. 

            The blow stuns him just enough that Matt doesn’t hear his skin above his ear snap, but he does feel the hot rush of blood that follow.  His leg doesn’t feel great either, having broken his fall.  There’s a flurry of voices and movement centered on him, all distorted, and Matt makes little effort to track them.  His ears have found Foggy’s heartbeat, and they stay latched to the sound until the world stops spinning so fast.  He’s on his back, free leg caught by Squirrelly’s desperate hands as Cigarettes tears his tie off and starts wrapping his face. 

            Matt doesn’t make it easy for him.  He tosses his head, dodges the binding, almost bites Cigarettes at one point until Baritone reminds him, “Your friend would make this nice and easy for us.” 

             “I would!” Foggy agrees.

            Cigarettes takes a break from wrapping the tie around Matt’s face, “SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH!”

            “Stop encouraging him,” Baritone snaps.  “More noise, the more likely the Devil’s going to show.  Let him shout all he wants.”

            “What about this one?” the knot Cigarettes makes take out a clump of Matt’s hair.  Matt can hear the laceration on his head rip open more from the force.  He bites back a small growl. 

            “We keep going.  You, kid,” Squirrelly snaps to attention.  He leaves palm prints on Matt’s leg from perspiration.  Terror informs all his little movements.  Matt can take him out last.  “Your job right now is to find a small block of wood.  You got that?  Something I can fit under his hand.”

            Squirrelly jumps up and runs away as fast as he can.  Matt can hear him digging through scraps of wood a second later.  Cigarettes takes over pinning Matt’s leg down to keep him from kicking.  His grip is strong, but it loosens the longer they wait.

            Matt goes perfectly still.  Beneath the blindfold, he feels more like himself, like the Mask, and all his senses fall in line.  He isn’t bothered by the cigarette burns or the bruises or the blood draining out of his skull.  He’s too busy focusing on letting his arm fall loose from the ropes naturally, without his captors noticing.  Finding the weak spots in their surroundings isn’t difficult.  Matt knows that a clumsy hit from the chair he’s attached to will bring on of the stacks of wood toppling over.  Then it’s just a well-placed fall on Baritone to keep that gun from coming into play. 

            The whole thing will look like a freak accident, not the work of a devil in disguise. 

            “Got it,” Squirrelly re-emerges from his quest. 

            “Bring it here,” Baritone says, sinking next to Matt’s side.  He grabs Matt’s unbloodied hand, the one still secured tightly to the armrest of the chair, and wraps Matt’s fingers over the block.  The wood is damp enough to give slightly from the pressure, but it holds between Matt’s fingers and wrist. 

            There’s a zipping sound, plastic against plastic.  Matt recognizes the sound.  A box cutter.  The blade on the air leaves a sour taste in his mouth.  He twitches when the point finds its way to the tip of his pinky finger.

            A pair of pliers clamps down on his fingernail. 

            “Five fingers, five fingernails,” Baritone tells him, as if he can’t do the math.  “I’m gonna count as I do this.  I get to five and you haven’t made a sound, I send someone over to count to ten with your friend.  Got me?”  
  
            Matt holds his other hand under the bindings.  He knows the actions he’ll take -  throwing Cigarettes into the pile of lumber, grabbing Baritone’s gun and shooting him in the leg, Squirrelly’s escape from the warehouse – but doubt nags at him.  One wrong move and they’ll go for Foggy.  Screw his secret identity: Baritone knows better places to put his box cutter than Matt’s finger if he wants to get a scream. 

            He can’t risk it.  Not Foggy.  That’s the real line he can’t cross. 

            “I got you,” Matt says.

            Baritone’s smile whistles in Matt’s ears like a boiling kettle, “Make it loud, Matt.”

            The pliers pull up, the box cutter slips underneath, and the nail peels off Matt’s finger with a red hot sting. 

            He screams. 

            Baritone’s still smiling, “One.” 

 

* * *

 

Thank you for reading!

           


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.
> 
> I churned out this chapter at a furious clip for two reasons: 1) it was all I could think about last night before turning in, once I knew how it was going to end, and 2) I’m honeymooning for about the next ten days, and I knew where I wanted to pick up after I came back. 
> 
> Readers, I’m so glad you are enjoying this story and, as some of you expressed, being grossed out by it. The night is always darkest just before the dawn. Thank you for your kind support! Hope you enjoy!

* * *

 

            Matt hears, “Five,” but he doesn’t feel it specifically.  The ripping of his thumb nail blends with the agony from his fingers.  He experiences the pain as a single, unified whole, like he’s dipped his hand into melted glass.  The nerve endings meld into a single streak of fury that stabs up his forearm. 

            He tries to get his scream under control.  Worries when he can’t.  It starts as a means of keeping them away from Foggy, but at some point his body decides yelling is the best reaction to excruciation.  Every exhale brings another cry despite himself.  Matt grits his teeth and can’t stop, not until his hearing refocuses on Foggy’s ragged breathing.  Foggy struggling with his bonds.  Foggy whimpering. 

            Matt shuts his mouth, keeps his vocalizations to a minimum, at least until he can declare, “I’m fine, Foggy.  I’m okay.  I’m-” Baritone grabs his mangled hand, and Matt chokes on his next shout.  The blood drains out of his face into his body while sweat pours from his brow to the floor.  “Damn it.  Damn you.”   
  
            “That was good,” Baritone admits, releasing his hand and pulling the block of wood out from under it.  The cool metal of the chair soothes the burn on his fingertips.  Matt finds he can breathe through the agony.  He lets the pain wash through him like a tide.  Baritone taps the box cutter against the chair leg.  “Remember anything about the Devil that you’d like to share with us?”   
  
            Matt lets his body go limp.  His one hand almost slips clean through the ropes.  Baritone’s on his left, Cigarettes is on his right, and Squirrelly isn’t going to be a problem.  He wonders how much blood is pouring off his other hand.  Hopefully enough to get free.  “I know…” his words are lost in an angry stab of heat from his arm.  “Ugh, God...I know that he likes breaking bones…”

            Which Matt is about to do.  To all of them.  Break their faces, their arms, their ankles.  He is going to lay all three of them to waste when he gets out of the chair. 

            Squirrelly’s voice is so quiet, Matt wonders if anyone else hears him speak, “I really

don’t think he knows anything.”

            Cigarettes’s chuckle lives right in the back of his throat, below his tongue.  “You didn’t grow up in Hell’s Kitchen, did you?”

            “Long Island…”

            Another chuckle, this time from Baritone, “Takes more than fingernails and cigarette burns to loosen someone’s tongue in Hell’s Kitchen.  Besides, whatever he knows or doesn’t know, this is all about rattling the devil’s cage a bit.  See what he thinks about his favourite lawyers taking a few hits on his behalf.” 

            Cigarettes kicks Matt in the shoulder, “What’s the devil gonna think about your busted hand?”   
  
            Matt loses control of his breathing.  The jostling sets another fire in his hand, this time fueled by fury.  “You’re going to have to ask him yourself,” he groans. 

            Baritone taps the box cutter along the metal limbs of the chair.  Matt follows it down the chair leg, wincing when it lingers above his Achilles’ tendon.  He wants to believe he can fight through everything, but a slashed Achilles’ tendon would end the devil real fast.  He gets another cane for that kind of injury. 

            The box cutter moves away from the chair.  Matt releases a breath he didn’t know he was holding.  Baritone notices.  When he’s not smoking, his heart does indicate his behaviour.  He’s making a mental note about Matt’s reaction to the box cutter around his Achilles’ tendon.  If his ankle wasn’t on the menu for tonight’s torture already, Matt knows it is now. 

            “Normally, at this point, I’d let that bleed for a bit,” Baritone lets the box cutter brush along Matt’s bicep, the blade catching on his shirt.  “But I don’t think you want us going after your friend.”

            Matt doesn’t dignify that with a response.  They already know he’s protecting Foggy.  Best to not make a spectacle of it.  Matt wants them to think that hurting him is far worse than hurting Foggy. 

            “So what do you say I keep counting?” Baritone asks.

            Matt bites down on his bottom lip.  He nods.  “Sit me up before you start.”

            Cigarettes scoffs, “You got a preference to how you lose your nails?”

            “I don’t want to choke if I throw up.”

            Squirrelly inches to get away from Matt’s leg as soon as possible.  The kid’s smart enough to know the direction of the spew. 

            The change in altitude makes Matt’s sense of equilibrium go haywire.  The world on fire enters a spiral.  He doesn’t pay attention to it, lets it and the pain flow through him.  He focuses on his free hand, on making sure it slips out of the ropes before Baritone can get a hold of it. 

            His leg’s free for a brief second.  Matt kicks experimentally, apologizes even when he hits Squirrelly in the leg.  Squirrelly thinks it’s an accident and doesn’t try to grab Matt’s leg.  It’s exactly what Matt needs.

            He has to make it look like an accident, like pure, dumb luck, that his hand gets free and dives forward into Baritone’s chest.  Easy enough when Baritone trips on his free leg, enters a quick fall before catching himself.  Matt punches him in the stomach, then, not quick enough for there to be questions, he grabs the gun and fires it at the floor.

            “JESUS!” Squirrelly lives up to his name and dashes out of the way.  His tiny heartbeat pounds in his tiny chest. 

            Matt ignores him.  He’s focused on Cigarettes, who winds up for a punch that Matt shouldn’t know is coming.  Baritone’s got his hands wrapped around the gun, so Matt fires again.  Flesh burns, abrades, and rips from the slide.  The bullet ends up in the floor.  Baritone follows, hands an absolute mess.  His screams are louder than Matt’s. 

            Cigarettes’s punch catches him just on the chin before Matt reacts.  He bashes the butt of the gun into Cigarettes’s face, aiming for the patch of bruised flesh he can feel, hot and inviting, around the eye.  The blow takes Cigarettes into the pile of lumber, which rocks unsteadily before falling in pieces on him and Baritone. 

            Matt balances himself on his one free foot and hops out of the way before he can get hit.  The motion is murder on his bound, mangled hand, but there’s a cool rush that comes from slipping his bloody fingers under the rope.  He gets himself free just in time for Squirrelly to once more enter the fight.

            He’s brought the stun gun.

            Hard to pretend he doesn’t sense the device in Squirrelly’s outstretched hand, at least not without giving himself away.  Matt passes off his maneuver as an act of sheer terror.  He leaps away from the still-rattling wood falling nearby, causing the chair to pivot on his bound leg.  Squirrelly hits it and drops the stun gun. 

            Matt boots the stun gun out of the way – on accident, of course.  He swings the gun at Squirrelly’s head and knocks the kid soundly unconscious.  Then he dismantles the weapon.  Tosses the clip away to one abandoned corner of the warehouse, and chucks the empty barrel and slide at Cigarettes – again, by accident – as the larger man pulls himself out from under the lumber.

            The blow buys Matt just enough time to dodge a tackle.  Cigarettes is a rhino.  He charges so hard and so fast he can’t stop before more lumber comes crashing down on top of him.  Matt dives out of the way, but the wood catches the chair and pins him in place. 

            Cigarettes is stunned, Squirrelly’s buried, and Baritone’s slowly pulling himself free from the wood pile.  Of the three, Matt’s worried the most about Baritone, whose heart is no longer slow and steady but wild and fast, the same kind of rhythm he suppressed with cigarettes.  He’s not crawling towards Matt; he’s working his way out of the wood pile towards Foggy.

            Matt reaches to untie ankle.  Neither of his hands wants to work.  The first is bloodied at the wrist, and the fingers are all cramped up from struggling.  His grip is crap with the other, since he can’t pinch at the ropes without feeling pain.  He starts kicking the chair, trying to bust the other leg, but the lumber keeps pinning his ankles in odd positions.  He kicks and almost ends up falling over.  Meanwhile, Baritone climbs out of the wood.  He picks up something metal off the ground.  It’s a sound Matt recognizes; he has the box cutter. 

            “FOGGY!” Matt shouts to warn him.  He yanks his free foot gruffly out from under the lumber and starts kicking the chair furiously.  The leg starts to bend at an odd angle, straining his ankle.  Matt finally picks the chair up with his good hand and twists.  The leg snaps off the chair and falls free of the ropes.  Matt moves quickly if unsteadily through the mess of lumber, punching Cigarettes in the face as he marches past.  The blow keeps the big guy down for another couple of seconds, but he’s still conscious.  Squirrelly, on the other hand, is still down for the count, so Matt kicks him too just for the hell of it.  Teach the kid to find a newer, safer, legal line of work. 

            “You stay away from him!” he calls after Baritone.  Foggy’s chair starts to scuffle across the floor.  “You want a personal devil?  I’ll give you one.”   
  
            “I want a real devil, Matt,” Baritone shouts back.  “You’re just practice.”

            Matt rushes forward.  Two heartbeats throb in the darkness before his eyes, both very fast: one from excitement, the other from terror.  Foggy’s chair shifts across the aging floorboards but stops short suddenly.  “Yeah, I told you: you should have tortured me,” Foggy declares with an uneasy laugh. 

            The smell of blood isn’t forthcoming, only the acrid scent of fear draining out of Foggy’s pores.  Matt reaches his friend and skids to a halt before he can do more damage.  He makes a show of being lost, of looking around, but he doesn’t have to.  Matt knows.  Worse, there’s nothing he can do to stop it. 

            “Tell your friend Matt what’s happening,” Baritone says. 

            Matt turns around so he’s at least facing the source of the sound.  His head’s full of fire; none of it’s sensory.  There’s just no more room for rage anywhere else in his body. 

            Foggy’s heart is a hummingbird in his chest.  He breathes in short gasps, “He’s braiding my hair.  OW!”

            The box cutter doesn’t make a sound even in Matt’s ears against Foggy, but a coppery scent fills the air.  Matt keeps his mouth closed against the taste.

            “He’s got a knife to my neck, Matt.  He just cut my face open,” Foggy says, shivering.  Then, “Why the hell aren’t you running?”   
  
            “Because he knows what I’m going to do if he does,” Baritone promises.  Matt can’t follow the box cutter well – not with any of his senses – but he’s positive that it’s not bound for good places.  There are a lot of areas Baritone can cut before Matt can get the police to come, and Foggy will live through all of them in agony.

            “Don’t hurt him,” Matt says, trying not to beg.  He lost track of the one person he needed to keep his eye on during the fight.  “You started this with me: finish it with me.”   
  
            “Oh, we’re going to finish it, don’t you worry,” Baritone slips into silence.  Matt can hear his hands shaking.  Burns and slashes across his palms: not a good combination for cutting throats.  Not the worst though apparently, since Baritone still has Foggy at knifepoint when Cigarettes finally gets moving again. 

            He’s brought a crowbar.  Matt can smell it.  Of course, he can’t let Cigarettes know that he smells it, so he has to stand very, very still when it comes crashing down into his rib cage. 

            Two of his ribs break on impact, and the sound is deafening.  Matt can hear the crunch and tear his whole way to the ground, and when he hits, he’s not breathing.  His ribcage locks and doesn’t ever want to breathe again.  The muscles scream around his cracked bones.  Alarms go off in his head, all red and angry and totally useless.  He can’t do anything without getting Foggy killed, but his body still has to get up because that’s what Murdocks do. 

            Cigarettes is only too happy to help Matt up by hooking the crowbar around his neck and pulling.  Already suffocating, Matt damn near passes out from the gesture.  He reaches a hand up to his throat dumbly, trying to free up his airway for whenever his ribcage starts to work again. 

            “Let him up on his feet,” Baritone orders.

            Matt falls back on the floor as the crowbars gets lifted away.  The blow shocks his body into working again, and his first breath is absolute torture.  He’s being crushed to death in the vice grip of his own body.  Something clawed and monstrous has a death grip on his broken ribs and keeps tugging them, ripping them, twisting them.  He can’t scream, can only roll his face against the floor, mouth open, gasping for air.

            Cigarettes taps him in the leg with the crowbar, “Get up.”

            He hears his father’s voice, insistent, telling him the same thing.  Matt’s face twists in agony, but he crawls slowly and shakily back to his feet. 

            The crowbar comes to rest on his side, directly above his broken ribs.  Matt listens to them grind as he sucks in tiny gasps of air.  “I can’t scream anymore,” he tells Baritone wheezily.

            “You don’t have to,” Baritone says.  “Your friend Foggy here is going to scream for you.  Nice and loud, Foggy, just like your friend Matt.  You don’t, and I have my associate use the crowbar instead of his fists.”  
  
            “Looks like he’s going to do that anyway,” Foggy growls. 

            “Only if you’re uncooperative.  As for your friend,” Baritone does something that makes Foggy gasp.  Matt’s heart thunders in his chest.  He holds his breath to listen, to smell, to feel.  The blade is right over top of Foggy’s jugular.  The hammer of his friend’s pulse makes the box cutter vibrate.  “You fight back, Matt, I start cutting, and it’ll be stuff your friend misses.”   
  
            “Let him cut me, Matt!” Foggy begs him.  “Let him cut me!  Get yourself out of here!”   
  
            “He isn’t going to do that,” Baritone says with a sickening smile.

            “Matt, I swear…”   
   
           “Can we just get this over with?” Matt demands.  He focuses on the blackness in front of his eyes, on the spaces between the flames in his mind.  Cigarettes is two weight classes ahead of him, but Matt knows he can take a punch.  It’s in his bones. 

            What he doesn’t know how to take is Foggy screaming.  The sound alights the world on fire in his brain, and it’s all Matt can hear once the punches start coming. 

            “MATT!”

 

* * *

 

…ummm…see you next week?  Happy reading?


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.
> 
> Hard to get back to writing such dark material after so many wonderful days. Thank you so much for all the kind wishes and congratulations! The Ally and I had a wonderful time on our honeymoon. 
> 
> I fully acknowledge that the diagnosis and first aid that Foggy provides in this chapter may not reflect medical practices. He is not a medical professional, and he is working under duress, so I hope the inaccuracies are understandable for now. 
> 
> Foggy’s perception of their captors is also different than Matt’s, so he’s given them other names: Baritone = Psycho. Cigarettes = Muscles. The Kid = Squirrelly. 
> 
> Readers, I’m sorry for the break between chapters. I hope this update finds you well. Your support and excitement made it easy to write this week. Cheers to you all! I am much obliged. Please, enjoy!

* * *

 

            Screaming comes easily.  Foggy starts before the big guy lands his first punch, and he stops only to breathe for more screaming.  Eventually, his cries becomes words, “Gee, I sure wish Daredevil was here _right now_!”

            Daredevil doesn’t show beyond the stoic expression on Matt’s face, and even then, he’s overcome.  Every punch cracks his façade until he’s on all fours, mouth open in a twisted, angry shout of vengeance denied, of helpless surrender.  “Stop!  STOP!” Foggy jumps around in his seat, yanking at his bonds.  The box cutter taps at his Adam’s apple; he doesn’t care.  He glances over his shoulder at the psycho with the knife, “Stop this.  You’re going to kill him, and if he dies, you had better kill me too _before I kill you_.”

            Psycho jabs the box cutter against Foggy’s jugular, “A little longer, I think.  The devil doesn’t seem to have heard you.”  
  
            Foggy tilts his head back and lets out a scream straight into Psycho’s ear, barely feeling the drag of knife when it slips into the skin above his clavicle.  He’s too damn satisfied with having knocked the bastard off his guard, “I WILL DESTROY YOU STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP!”

            Psycho waits for him to finish, and then, very calmly, with the box cutter prodding at Foggy’s upper chest, “You can stop now.”  
  
            The big guy lays one final punch to Matt’s upper back, successfully knocking Matt to the floor.  Matt doesn’t stay down though.  Foggy stares in amazement as he plants his hands under his shoulders and lifts himself back up. 

            It’s not the stubbornness that surprises Foggy, nor the force of will, so much as the physical improbability – the physical implausibility – of Matt rising.  Human beings shouldn’t be able to take a beating like that and get back up for more. 

            Muscles is pacing, all raw, wiry energy from the beating he’s just given.  He has to bounce away to keep from punching again.  Foggy ignores him.  He only has eyes for Matt, whose face is still twisted in that vengeful, pained snarl.  Whose mouth snaps open and shut as he takes bites out of the world.  Whose whole body is shaking because his chest isn’t moving and oh, God, “Matt?  Matt, can you breathe?”

            Dumbest. Question.  Ever.  Foggy breaks into a full body flail trying to break out of his bonds, “He can’t breathe!”

            “Just give him a minute,” Muscles rolls his eyes.  “That’s one tough sonnuvabitch.  He’s just got the wind knocked out of him.”  
  
            “You better hope that’s true,” Foggy snaps back.  He watches, waits, struggles – come on, Matt.  Come on.  Breathe.  Just breathe.  Psycho’s moved the box cutter out of the way so he starts jumping up and down, tearing at the ropes.  Matt’s mouth hangs open.  His shoulders tense, release, tense, release, but his chest does nothing. 

            Then there’s the sound of air ripping into his mouth and throat, the spasm of his chest as it opens at least only to shut again just as quickly, and those sounds are louder in Foggy’s ears than his desperate shouts that his best friend is dying. 

            Psycho slashes the box cutter at Foggy’s bonds in a few swift movements and says something about helping his friend.  Foggy doesn’t bother to punch him, even though he wants to.  He stumbles out of the chair and lands next to Matt.  He places a hand on his friend’s shoulder, not having a clue what to do.  Foggy tries to remember what little first aid he’s learned.  The best he can come up with is _Signs_ , of all things, where the kid’s having an asthma attack.  Foggy wraps his hands under Matt’s arms and gently tugs him back into a sitting position, one where his chest actually has room to expand. 

            The motion causes Matt’s whole body to freeze, and Foggy almost drops him.  For the longest, painful second since Matt started getting beaten, Foggy actually thinks he murdered his friend with his stupid, Shyamalan-inspired attempt to save a life.  The second Matt’s back hits his chest though, Foggy hears the muscles loosen.  Matt springs up against him, manages a few shallow breaths, and then crumples against Foggy. 

            “That’s it…just breathe,” Foggy keeps his voice even and quiet this close to Matt’s ears.  Hard to do when his heart is raging in his chest, but Foggy focuses on the shallow, rapid sucks of air Matt keeps making.  “Just breathe, Matt.”

            Foggy makes the mistake of looking at Matt’s face and can’t bear the sight of it.  Matt’s pale, paler than he was after Nobu and Fisk worked him over.  His skin looks like tissue paper, and his lips are an alarming gray-purple in colour.  Foggy tears off the tie binding Matt’s eyes: they’re closed but are bobbing back and forth rapidly inside his skull.  Blood drains out of his swollen, nail-less fingers onto Foggy’s leg, and there’s definitely blood mixing with the pink, purple, and green bruises developing on his chest. 

            Matt suddenly seizes up in Foggy’s grasp.  He hisses and sputters, trying to orient himself.  Foggy doesn’t know whether to loosen his grip or tighten it, not until he sees Matt reaching for his ribs.  “I got it, I got it…” he plants one arm between Matt’s hands and the injury, and he uses his free hand to hold the ribs in place.  They move and crack under his grip.  Foggy almost pukes.  He stops when the pressure seems to help.  Matt still gasps, but his breathing evens out. 

             He’s cold.  He shouldn’t be cold, not when he’s also sweating heavily.  Little as Foggy knows about first aid, he’s pretty confident chills and perspiration travel in opposite packs.  “Look, I’ll scream, I’ll cry, I’ll do whatever you want,” he begs his attackers, “but you have to get him to a hospital or he is going to die.”  
  
            Muscles is about to say something mean.  He laughs humourlessly in preparation.  Foggy doesn’t give him a chance.  He speaks to the one he knows is in charge, the Psycho with the box cutter, “You can have me.  Just please, please don’t let my friend die.”

            “He’s still breathing,” Psycho points the box cutter at Matt.

            “Yeah, for now.  I don’t know if you saw him a couple of seconds ago but-”

            Matt starts coughing.  His whole body gets in on the action: arms and legs thrashing, chest seizing, head tossing.  Foggy keeps one hand over Matt’s broken ribs and on his shoulder.  He holds Matt, eyes shut up tight, begging under his breath for this to be okay, for this to be fine.  They’re going to get out of this one.  Matt just needs to hold on a little longer so that Foggy can come up with a plan. 

            And he better come up with one soon.  Matt falls forward when he stops coughing.  When Foggy catches him, there’s bloody saliva draining out of his mouth. 

            “You see that?” he pulls Matt back against his chest, running his hand along his friend’s mouth.  The blood is bright red and foamy on his palm.  “He’s coughing up blood!  You, idiot,” he points at Muscles, in case he doesn’t know that he’s the idiot, “You probably punctured his lung!”

            Back to Psycho, who looks like he’s giving this at least some thought, Foggy says, “You want the devil?  I’ll get the devil for you.  But he has to go to the hospital.”

            Otherwise there won’t be a devil for them to catch, but Foggy doesn’t want to think about that.

            Psycho sheathes the box cutter and puts it in his pocket.  He walks toward Foggy, fingers tapping on the chair as he passes, “Way I see it, you’re both going to need a hospital before we’re through, so your friend’s going to have to wait until you’re ready to go too.”

            Foggy can’t believe this, “You can leave me for dead after you’re done with me.”

            “Actually, we can’t,” Muscles could not be unhappier about that.  “No leaving you two for dead.”

            “Says who?”

            “None of your business,” Psycho glares hellfire and brimstone at Muscles.  Foggy understands: their employer doesn’t want him or Matt killed, just injured, and it’s really putting a cramp in Muscles’s homicidal style.  Psycho is going to deal with that later, “You can have a couple of minutes with your friend.  Make sure he’s going to make it.”  
  
            “And if he doesn’t?”

            “Then someone else is going to be screaming,” Psycho keeps his gaze trained on Muscles. 

            The tension in the room crackles to new heights.  Muscles advances several paces towards Psycho like a bull about to charge, “Hey!  You told me to hit the guy!”  
  
            Psycho doesn’t dignify him with a response.  Muscles has done enough talking for the both of them.  Instead, Psycho looks down at Foggy, “What does he need to pull through?”  
  
            Foggy almost gives him some smartass response about not being a doctor, but with the pressures on Muscles, he holds his tongue, sticks to the facts.  “I don’t know.  Clean water?  A towel?  A belt for his ribs?”

            “You heard the man,” Psycho tells Muscles.

            “What?  You want me to play nursemaid?”  
            “I want you to not screw this up more than you already have.”

            Psycho means business.  Foggy sniffs the air, wondering if that’s who Matt was referring to as the dangerous one.  He can small cigarette smoke coming from both men.  Matt’s no help.  He’s definitely unconscious or at the very least entirely occupied with the task of breathing. 

            The standoff ends with a scoff from Muscles, who undoes his belt and throws it straight into Foggy’s back.  The buckle snaps at his neck and draws blood.  He doesn’t give them the satisfaction of his groan.  His wounds from the box cutter hurt worse than a small nic from a belt buckle.  Sweat is pouring into the fresh laceration on his face, while Matt’s perspiration is causing his collarbone cut to sting. 

            Foggy eases Matt onto the floor.  Matt’s breathing, already painfully laboured, grows shallower the lower he gets.  Foggy tries not to freak out, and in doing so, freaks out, “Can I get some help here?”

            “Help out,” Psycho tells Muscles.

            “Hell no,” Foggy snaps, “Not from him.”

            Muscles is only too happy to be off the hook.  “Where’s the kid?” he wanders away to look. 

            Psycho stands his ground, not once looking at either Matt or Foggy.  He’s got his hand in the pocket with the box cutter.  Yep, Foggy decides, he is the worst of the three of them.

            Matt springs into another coughing fit.  Foggy helps him sit up, supports his spine when his shuddering chest won’t, and wipes the blood off his lips when it’s over.  Words are coming out of Foggy’s mouth.  He has no idea what he’s saying, nothing’s helping, but he has to remind himself and Matt that they are going to be okay.  This is fine.  Nothing to worry about.  It’s just a little bit of blood.  Coming out of his lungs. 

            The Kid, tiny and shivery and wounded, appears behind them.  Foggy wastes no time is giving him orders.  The flatter Matt gets, the harder it is for him to breathe, so Foggy tells the Kid to keep him as upright as possible.

            Muscles’s belt is way too big for Matt’s frame.  Foggy tosses it back to the big guy.  “Give me yours,” he tells the Kid.  “Your belt, come on.  Hurry.” 

            The Kid almost drops Matt in the rush to get his belt off.  Foggy bites his tongue yet again.  Psycho is the only person holding this ragtag trio together.  He is all the brains of the operation.  Well, most of them.  The Kid has enough sense to elevate Matt again the second he hands Foggy the belt.

            Foggy wraps the belt around Matt’s torso, causing his friend to stir.  Matt looks to be trying to get away, but his motions are syrupy slow, confused.  He nearly clocks Foggy in the face with a half-formed fist.  Foggy shoves his arm out of the way, “It’s me, Matt.”  He slips the belt through its loop and slowly draws it into place.  “It’s me, and I’m sorry, but this is going to hurt.”

            He pulls the belt till it’s tight, and then pulls a little more just to test, to see.  “They did not teach us this shit in law school,” he mutters angrily, hoping that’ll convince the belt to help.  The universe grants him that small mercy at least.  Matt’s breathing stays shallow, but with his ribs held in place, at least it’s at a steady rhythm.

            Muscles rolls a bottle of water towards Foggy.  “No clean rags,” he grunts, and then, to Psycho, “unless I’m supposed to give them the shirt off my back too.”

            Foggy dumps water over Matt’s hand, getting the Kid wet too.  “Geez!”  
  
            “Oh, poor you,” Foggy’s chide hits him like a slap.  “It’s a little water.  Are your ribs broken?  Are you about to get tortured?” The Kid’s eyes get watery, so he starts to snarl.  The expression just prompts Foggy to make his tone meaner.  “My best friend is dying because you guys don’t understand what ‘we don’t know anything’ means.  The field where my fucks are grown is barren.  Literally empty.  I have zero fucks for you and your wet pants and your psychotic friends and…” Foggy picks up Matt’s tie and douses it in water.  He starts wiping off some of the blood from the – ah, Christ, he’s not angry enough not to cry – the cigarette burns on Matt’s chest.  “…and whatever idiot hired you to hospitalize two lawyers on a quack theory.” 

            “You done?” Psycho asks.

            “My rant or patching up my friend?”

            “Both,” Muscles is rubbing the bridge of his nose.  Clearly, he gets a migraine when he goes too long without punching something. 

            Foggy picks up Matt’s hand, surveying the damage and wondering, once again, how he’s supposed to treat the injury.  He finally folds Matt’s hand into a fist and wraps the wet tie around the bloody nail beds.  Matt lets out a small, breathless cry when the fabric hits his wounds.  “Stop…” he tries to roll away.  “Stopstopstop...”

            “I’m stopping,” Foggy shoots an icy glance to Psycho.  At least someone is drawing the line.  He heaves Matt’s arm over his shoulder and lifts him up off the seething Kid. 

            “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Muscles asks.  “You think this is over?”

            Foggy listens to make sure Matt is still breathing, and then he lets himself take a deep breath.  Jesus, Matt is heavy.  “I know this isn’t over.  I was just going to make sure my friend’s stable, and it sounds like it’s in your best interest to make sure he stays that way.”  
  
            “The lawyer’s right,” Psycho is only too happy to admit it.

            Muscles is not happy.  He cracks his knuckles at Foggy, “I’m going to rip that smart tongue right out of your mouth.”  
  
            “I’m going to bite your fingers right off your hand,” Foggy chomps his teeth together, “That is, if your boss doesn’t cut them off first.”  
  
            Psycho intervenes, probably because Foggy’s giving away his trade secrets.  “Stay with them,” he orders Muscles.  “Bring him over when you know his friend’s going to make it.”

            Foggy starts to turn.  He saw a really good wood pile, the least mildewy, most secluded he can see, where Matt can catch his breath.  First thing’s first though: gotta poke the bear.  “You coming?” he sasses Muscles. 

            “I’m coming” Muscles intones, “for you.”

            Worried as he is for Matt, Foggy hopes he stays unconscious a little longer.  Buy him a little bit of time before the pounding.  He’s going to need a really good plan, and he’s going to need it fast. 

 

* * *

 

Happy reading!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.
> 
> I meant to have another chapter of _Just in Case_ ready today, but my next installment is giving me hell. I took a break with this. I hope you enjoy!
> 
> The line delivered at the end of this chapter - which includes the title of the fic - is commonly attributed to Charles Manson. It is also uttered in the movie _The Devil’s Rejects_. However, I’ve read conflicting reports about its origin, so the best I can assert is that it’s not mine. 
> 
> Readers, lovely readers, sweet readers: I can’t thank you all enough for your kindness and patronage. Hope you are all well!

* * *

 

            Shadows of sound waft through him – a moan, a hiss, Matt can you hear me?  He tugs on their edges until his head is filled with sudden pangs of red, red, red.

            The words tear out of his throat like a handful of shrapnel:  “…can’t breathe.  I can’t breathe.  I can’t breathe.”  Not entirely true, since his chest is moving, but the air keeps getting stuck before his lungs can lap it up.  He’s caught underneath something heavy.  There’s a pressure on his chest that won’t release.  Matt searches for the weight, and his hands end up on his ribs instead, hovering over a place where his insides feel like they’re clawing to get out. 

            “Matt, you have to calm down.” 

            Foggy must not have heard him: “Can’t.  Breathe.”

            “You can, Matt.  But you have to calm down,” Foggy pulls his hands away from his ribs.  The twisting, ripping, and tearing in his chest resumes alongside the burning, crimson ache for air.  He’s dying.  He’s dying and Foggy doesn’t understand.

            Matt wrestles his hands out of Foggy’s grasp.  The motion jostles his tenuous self-control.  Muscles in his body start crying out their own agonies: bruises, burns, internal bleeding.  Matt’s hearing cuts out before he can pinpoint where the broken bones are.

            The red cuts to black. 

            Things are calmer the second time around.  Two heartbeats rouse him, one slow and one fast.  Matt can’t figure out which is his until the warbling weaves its way into words, “Small breaths.  Slowly.  See?  You can breathe.”  
  
            Pain looms on the fringes of his awareness.  Matt feels like prey before a sneak attack.  “Just hold still.  Keep breathing,” Foggy whispers.  The pain slinks deeper into darkness the longer Matt does, so he pays attention to Foggy and only to Foggy.  To the feeling of a thumb drawing circles on the back of his hand.  To the soft, gentle reminders than he can breathe, that’s good, take it slow.  To the relieved sigh that comes when his eyelids eek open even just a crack. 

            “Matt.” 

            His name sounds as flat as his perceptions at the moment.  Matt matches the tone, “Foggy.”  He tries to follow the thread of sound as it meanders its way through space, but the world on fire is nothing more than embers.  There’s not enough air for him to focus on Foggy and his surroundings, and trying to play catch up makes the blackness sweep over him again.

            Foggy really is all that matters anyways, and he’s right there.  “For once, I need you to forget that you are very stubborn and listen to me.”

            Matt can do that, “Kay.”

            “A few of your ribs are broken.  Stop, stop,” Foggy grips his hands tightly.  Pain is back.  Matt feels it take a few swipes at his chest with its claws before settling back into darkness.  “Stop trying to figure out which ones.  Trust me, they’re broken.  You can’t breathe very deeply because I belted them into place.”

            This is all sounds perfectly normal, and with small gasps of air moving in and out of his body, Matt accepts them whole-heartedly, “Kay.”  
  
            “I’m going to leave here in just a minute.“  
  
            “Where are you going?  Why are you going?  What’s-“ he starts spiralling – red, gray, and black – until Foggy’s hand is on his cheek to hold him in place  and the pain stops cresting and the breathing resumes.

            “New rule,” Foggy lowers his hand from Matt’s cheek, “In addition to not panicking and not being stubborn, you are no longer allowed to talk.”

            Matt doesn’t remember when they agreed he wouldn’t panic, but he doesn’t argue.  “Where are you going?”  
  
            “I’m serious, Matt.  No talking.”

            He can’t repeat himself.  He’s barely getting enough oxygen to stay conscious, but he has to know, “Where?”

            Foggy’s heartbeat goes from a skip to a run, “Not far.  Just a little way.  Have some business to sort out.  I’ll be back before you know it.”  
  
            The circles he’s drawing on the back of Matt’s hans get deeper, a distraction if there ever was one, and Matt tries to tear himself away but he can’t.  His chest hurts too much.  There’s bruising all the way to his lungs, swelling his airway shut.  He ends up swirling under Foggy’s touch despite himself, mollified by the persistence of the motion.

            “You can’t breathe when you lie down,” Foggy tells him.  “I don’t know why.  I thought you punctured a lung, but…”

            Matt tries to shake his head.  He ends up turning it one way and not being able to turn it back, “No, my lungs are fine.  I think there’s…” he focuses, focuses, focuses.  The circulation of fluid in his chest is all wrong.  There’s too much of it, and some of it’s not the right type, “I’m bleeding internally.”

            Foggy almost drops his hands.  “Jesus,” he says the name as flatly as he said Matt’s.  “You were coughing up blood before.”

            “Sounds about right,” the memories start coming back to him.  There’s a long string of blows connected by the stench of cigarette smoke that leaves Matt momentarily winded, long enough for him to appreciate Foggy’s ground rules of not panicking, not talking, and not being stubborn.  Still, he has to know, “Have they hurt you?”

            Foggy sighs, “Not yet.  They wanted me to make sure you were okay first, but the big guy is itching at the bit to get his hands on me now that you’re awake.”  
  
            “Cigarettes?” Matt listens for the third heartbeat.  He thinks he hears one in the distance, but he thinks he hears a lot of things that, as it turns out, are coming from his own body.  Pain has really scrambled his perception.

            “If you say so,” Foggy replies, lowering his voice and inadvertently drawing Matt back to the tiny world his brain’s constructed between the two of them as a result.  “Who, by the way, is not the most dangerous of these three.  The psycho with the box cutter is worse.”

            “Yeah, he’s a piece of work,” Matt thinks he can hear footsteps.  “Is someone coming?”

            They both know what that means.  Foggy could not be more disappointed, “Yeah.” 

            “Help me up, Foggy.”

            “Uh…rule number two, Matt: don’t be stubborn?  I’m not even going to mention not talking.”  
  
            “You can’t…I’m not going to let them take you,” he should have spent more time orienting himself in the space.  Trying to stand up is impossible when he doesn’t know what his legs are doing or where up is.  Foggy doesn’t even try to stop him, a fact that Matt forgets to take as a sign until he’s hacking up one of his useless lungs. 

            He almost vomits from the taste of blood in his mouth.  Foggy tips him forward until it drains out of him.  Then Matt is propped back up against the woodpile, taking his shallow breaths.  Foggy is too upset to coach him through.  He keeps his hands on Matt’s, “Whoever hired these guys don’t want us dead: they just want to send a message.  So I’m going to go and let them kick my ass and then this hell night can be over.”

            “I’m not going to let them hurt you,” Matt declares.  “They lay a hand on you and I’ll-”

            “You’ll bleed on them?”

            “Foggy,” though he is loath to admit that’s his best case scenario. 

            “Believe me when I say that there is no one is less excited than me that I’m going to be tortured,” Foggy pats him on the hand, “but the sooner I do this, the sooner we get out of here.”

            “You don’t…you don’t know that,” Matt tries to get a grip on Foggy’s hand.  He squeezes the fingers in his reach.  “They’re professionals.  They can make this last as long as they need for…for the devil to show up.”   
  
            Foggy’s pulse gets preternaturally calm, “They have orders not to kill us.”  
  
            “All the more reason for them to take their time.”

            “I don’t know: I think I can piss them off enough to do me in right quick.  The big guy already hates me.”  
  
            Matt mentally counts to ten.  He gets to three before, “I won’t let them hurt you, Foggy.”  
  
            Foggy’s heartbeat gets heavier.  It’s the only sound Matt hears, and it’s scary as hell, especially when it’s interrupted by, “You don’t have a choice, Matt.”

            He tries to come up with another idea.  Nothing comes together.  Foggy doesn’t know martial arts.  The few physical confrontations he’s been in have either been won with weapons or wits.  “I hurt them earlier,” Matt tells him, hoping the injuries will give Foggy an edge.  “The one with the deep voice, the psycho, he burned his hands on the gun when it went off.  The big guy and the kid both got buried under some lumber.”

            “Matt…”

            “Look, just…” he forces his ears beyond Foggy, beyond the fuzz in his skull from blood loss.  He opens his mind up to everything he’s been shutting out and ends up overwhelmed with sensory information.  Water below, night sky above; rotting wood and rusted nails and a crowbar!  Cigarettes still has his crowbar, and he’s slapping the crook of it into the palm of his hand.  Matt fixes on Cigarettes for a long time, concentrating, relaying to Foggy, “He’s got blood on him.  Find out where.  He’s also limping slightly.  Aim for his right leg.  No, left.”

            “This is the coolest and scariest-“

            “Let me do this,” he moves past Cigarettes to the other heartbeats.  The steady pulse in the distance that smells faintly of burnt flesh and leather.  Baritone on the approach.  For Foggy.  Baritone’s coming for Foggy.  Matt’s whole thought process is derailed.  “Great.” 

            “Your friend going to make it?” Baritone asks upon arrival.

            “You stay away from him,” Matt snaps.  He tries to breathe normally and almost ends up aspirating more blood. 

            Foggy drops Matt’s hands, ignoring him, “Yeah.  Yeah, he’s going to make it.  That’s good news for you, big guy!”    
  
            Cigarettes perks up like a kid on Christmas.  Matt can hear the crowbar dangling at his side.  “Get ‘em all out of your system while you can still talk, smart ass,” he invites Foggy. 

            “Don’t you worry: I intend to let you know exactly how worthless you are.  Shall we, gentlemen?”  
  
            “What’s wrong with right here?” Cigarettes has a bloodthirsty lilt to his tone.  “It’s not like your friend can see you.”

            “If my friend can’t see me, it doesn’t matter where we go,” Foggy replies.  “But since you busted his ribcage, he might stop breathing if he’s too close to the action, and that would be really bad for you, wouldn’t it, Cockwomble?”

            “What the fuck did you just call me?” Cigarettes demands, winding up for his first swing of the night.  His shoulder makes a popping sound, followed by a hiss of breath that only Matt can hear. 

            Baritone puts a stop to Cigarettes’s advance, but he seconds the question more calmly, “What did you just call him?”

            “I have no idea,” Foggy replies cheerfully, and then his voice takes a sardonic turn, “but it doesn’t sound good, does it?”

            Matt throws a futile punch into the ground.  The first thing Cigarettes aims for will be Foggy’s jaw, and with a crowbar…his broken ribs sting sympathetically.  Matt’s chest lurches unsteadily for air.  He can feel his heart crumpling in desperation.  “Take me,” he means to roar but his voice comes out as a grumble.  “Take me instead.  Leave him out of this.”

            He feels the strength returning to his legs.  Actually, it’s just adrenaline, but it’s enough that Matt thinks he might be able to stand.  He keeps the thought of Foggy vs. a crowbar firmly on his mind in order to fuel him.  Planting his feet underneath him doesn’t hurt so much.  Matt holds a breath and uses the woodpile to hoist himself up.

            Pain is waiting.  It leaps out of the darkness and bites down hard on his chest, saving its biggest tooth for his broken ribs.  There’s a strangled cry, and Matt’s face hits the ground first, followed by his wounded side.  He’s too keyed up to pass out, so he gets to enjoy every second of his agony in supersonic detail.  That includes the sound of his cracked ribs grinding futilely as he forces breath after breath into his swollen chest, not to mention the Foggy’s frantic shuffle to save his life.

            “I don’t know why you’re laughing,” Foggy snarls in the distance.  Matt guesses it’s Cigarettes he’s talking to.  “If he dies, it’s on you.”  
  
            “Hey,” Cigarettes shoots back, “he did that to himself.”  
  
            Psycho, ever the voice of reason, observes, “He wouldn’t be able to if you had used your head.  Get rid of that crowbar.  You want to be responsible for killing the other one too?” he doesn’t give Cigarettes a chance to confirm.  “Don’t answer that.  Just get rid of the crowbar.”   
  
            The world cycles around Matt as he’s drawn back into a sitting position.  Foggy’s hand is cool against his abused chest and provides a good centre for him to start breathing again.  “That was stupid,” Foggy admonishes him quietly, “though I appreciate not being beaten by a crowbar.”  
  
             “His shoulder popped.”  
  
            “What?”  Foggy leans in.  

            Matt digs his arm against his broken ribs, helping air get in and out of his chest.  The pain drowns out his focus, but he whispers to Foggy, “The big guy.  His shoulder popped.  I think it’s injured.  Hit him there, and in the leg, and make it hurt.”  
  
            The silence is infuriatingly scarlet.  Matt doesn’t even know if Foggy’s still there, if he’s been heard.  He can’t keep holding his chest either.  He’s going to puncture his own lung if he doesn’t let go.

            His arm drops.  Matt sputters, extinguished, head full of smoke and ashes.  He’s conscious enough to steady his breathing and waits for the world to re-emerge.  It doesn’t; instead, Matt slips away, and he doesn’t have the strength to come back.  “Foggy…” he hisses, hoping for a sign.  “Foggy, Foggy, Foggy…”

            A thumb draws a circle on his palm.  Matt feels himself waking up a little bit, holding onto the feeling of Foggy’s hand on his.

            “For one night and one night only,” Foggy whispers with a small laugh, “I am the devil, and I am here to do the devil’s work.”

            He draws his hand away from Matt’s and disappears.

            Matt thinks he passes out, but Foggy’s voice returns a second later, “But on the off-chance that’s not true, I think you should know that I love you, buddy, and I’ll see you on the other side.”    

            Then he’s gone. 

 

* * *

 

Happy reading!

             
           


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.
> 
> I meant to have this chapter up last night, but I was out all day playing a classy dame at a local car show. I am pleased to say that this fic is winding down though. I’m thinking two more chapters after this before it’s really over. 
> 
> The song Foggy sings is the same one from "Cut Man": "Pirates of Penzance". 
> 
> Readers, I’m sorry to have kept you waiting! I do hope you enjoy this chapter! Please have had yourselves wonderful weekends. I’m traveling again tomorrow, so my next update probably won’t be until the end of this week. 
> 
> I’m going to apologize in advance and again at the end of this chapter, because I kind of did a thing. It’s a…well, read. Enjoy!

* * *

 

            Matt doesn’t pass out.  He refuses to pass out.  He clings to the knowledge that Foggy is out there in the darkness along with their captors.  There is a trace of Foggy in the ether.  Matt only has to focus.

            Unfortunately, all his senses are facing inward.  His hearing is caught on the unnatural moans, groans, and crackles coming from his body.  He reeks of sweat and blood from a variety of donors, to say nothing of his own body odour.  Measuring the temperature or air flow in the room is made impossible by the pain.  Even when he focuses outside of his broken ribs, Matt discovers that his tortured hand pulses in agony.  The cigarette burns smart.  He has bruises on internal organs that register on his heightened senses.  He can feel the swelling of his kidneys and spleen. 

            There’s blood in all sorts of places it shouldn’t be.  Matt doesn’t get a chance to smell it before his tongue translates it into taste.  Blood and skin from his bruises, blood and wet and cotton from his tie, blood and stone from the floor, blood and more blood circulating in his chest, collapsing his lungs. 

            “Hey, you keep breathing, you hear?”

            The threat is too loose in Squirrelly’s voice, delivered in a tone that wavers between committed and fearful.  He sounds like a kid trying on his father’s clothes, hoping the outfit will make the man.  Instead, just speaking calls attention to his youth and inexperience. 

            Matt can work with that.  He still can’t hear Foggy, but being able to hear something outside of himself is a promising sign.  He encourages the interaction, keeping his voice soft to conserve air, “So what if I don’t?  You go tell your boss to come and give me CPR?”  
  
            Squirrelly hasn’t thought that far ahead.  He shuts up and thinks hard, heart racing through ideas.  “We’re not supposed to kill you,” is all he can say. 

            Footsteps.  Matt can’t tell how far away they are.  His hearing leaps too close to them, giving him no sense of dimension.  Still, he holds onto them, willing himself to focus as hard as he can.  The effort is wasted.  No sooner has he started to measure than his hearing cuts out from his erratic breathing.  Matt is left in the dark with Squirrelly for company.  He lets his irritation show.

            “If you kill us, your employer will kill you.”  
  
            He wants to scare the kid, and he succeeds.  Squirrelly’s respiration spikes, “Yeah,” and then, like a boy in his father’s clothes again, “so you better keep breathing.”

            Matt searches the air around Squirrelly in increasingly larger increments.  Sounds of the Hudson echo underfoot.  The wood gives off a dense, ambient hum.  A light fixture swings from a chain on the ceiling, buzzing with electricity.  Matt stops focusing, closes his eyes, and lets the sound flow through him.  He’s not able to hone in on particulars, so he’ll have to settle for opening himself up to everything, even the stuff that isn’t Foggy.  It’s all his brain can do as he saves all his focus for counting his breath.

            He can hear the footsteps again, and this time they’re distant, interwoven with voices.  Foggy arguing with Cigarettes about what torture is.  The footsteps stop.  A shake starts off in Matt’s head and echoes all the way to his feet. 

            The first blow is a wet slap of knuckles on skin, a punch for Foggy’s smart mouth, no doubt.  There’s no theatrics: no answering scream or defiant laughter.  Foggy takes the blow in silence, at least to Matt’s ears.

            Matt draws a meditative breath and listens.  Foggy regains his footing after the blow before another punch knocks him down.  He breaks into a small laugh – “You are a waste of human flesh.” – and Cigarettes punches him.  More laughter follows, louder this time, fuelled by fury. 

            Matt taps his mangled hand against the floor as a distraction.  The pain blots out his fear and loathing, letting him hear Foggy and challenge Squirrelly in the same moment.  “What do you think the devil’s going to do when he sees what you’ve done to us?”  
  
            “Is that the best you’ve got?” Foggy spits.  “My four year old niece punches harder than you.” He groans suddenly.  Cigarettes lets out a roar.  Hair snaps from Foggy’s scalp as he’s thrown. 

            Matt drops his hand on the floor again, letting the pain wash up his arm, stabbing into the base of his skull in solidarity with Foggy.  “We might not know much about the devil,” Matt sputters, “but the devil knows a lot about us.  He-” Foggy gets the wind knocked out of him from a kick.  Matt forgets to rattle his injuries and feels the full force of his own anger.  His eyes fly open, and he searches out the spot where Squirrelly’s heart is racing.  “What do you really think the devil is going to do when he shows up?”  
  
            “We’ll be ready for him,” Squirrelly almost sounds confident.  Almost.  Maybe it’s Foggy’s pained shouting that has him talking like a winner. 

            Matt jabs his knuckles at the floor.  It’s all he can do.  He can’t fight, can’t run, can’t call for help.  He can’t trade places with Foggy.  He is stuck wasting energy on air that he can’t even breathe properly, talking to a kid who is only slightly less useful than he is, listening to his best friend get beaten.  He doesn’t have enough room inside of him for all that, plus the guilt that comes with it, plus the emotional turmoil.  So he shuts it all up for a few brief seconds with a pain he know.  A pain he can manage.  A pain that tells him he can still swing a punch if he gets the chance. 

            “Get his hand,” Baritone orders.  There’s a struggle as Foggy is grabbed.  Matt waits for the sound of the box cutter sliding open, but Baritone must have a new weapon.  “Broad strokes and head injuries aren’t working.  It’s the small stuff that gets the big reactions.”

            Foggy is pulled and tugged into position.  Matt can’t build a visual image from the sounds.  There’s too many feet scraping against the wooden floor and hands tugging against bodies. 

            “The devil isn’t going to kill us,” Squirrelly says, confidence still holding strong.  “Our employer will.”  

            “You said you were a screamer,” Baritone tells Foggy.  “Scream for me, huh?”  
            Foggy laughs, “Oh, no.  You had your chance to hear me scream, and you decided to go after my friend.  So screw you.  I’m not screaming.”

            A bone breaks: just a little one, probably a finger, but Matt hears the pop reverberate down his spine.  He gags, body refusing to take another breath as the sound replays itself over and over in his brain.  He hears Foggy’s breath punch its way out of his chest, a scream denied, before it’s replaced with something that sends shivers down Matt’s spine. 

            Foggy’s smile is sickeningly audible as he begins, “Pour, oh, pour the pirate sherry.  Fill, oh, fill the pirate glass!”  Baritone breaks another finger, so Foggy sings louder and less on key, “And to make us more than merry let the pirate bumper pass!”

            He chokes when Baritone breaks his next two fingers in rapid succession.  The words get caught in his throat and refuse to pass.  Matt braces himself for the scream by shoving his mangled hand into the floor again.  Pain cuts out the infuriating steadiness of Baritone’s heart asserting itself next to Foggy’s frantic pulse. 

            Foggy’s voice is shaking almost as bad as Matt is, but he doesn’t surrender his cheery, self-assuredness for a second, “I am going to run out of fingers before I run out of song.”

            Then he’s singing at the top of his lungs.  Not even the sound of his fifth finger breaking gets him to break speed, merely sing louder and in a falsetto. 

            Squirrelly doesn’t like the sound of Foggy’s cheery singing overlaying torture much more than Matt does.  He’s right foot is tapping against the floor in a constant rhythm.  Matt wonders how much more scared he can get this kid as Cigarettes and Baritone wrestle for Foggy’s other hand, “The devil is going to make sure that you three survive.”  
  
            “How do you know?” Squirrelly demands, his voice rising up a pitch. 

            “Because the dead can’t suffer.” 

            Squirrelly’s heart bucks against his sternum in fear, “You’re just trying to scare me.”

            Matt smirks, “It’s working.”  

            “Shut up.  Just shut up.  You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Squirrelly’s hands wave through the air erratically, bouncing on and off his ears.  “The devil’s not coming.”  
  
            “The devil is coming,” Matt’s lungs burn in protest.  “Probably not tonight, but he is going to come.  For your friends.  For you.”

            “He won’t know where to find us.”  
  
            “The devil always knows where to find the people he’s looking for.”  
  
            “No.  No way.  Even if you and your friend tell him-” Matt doesn’t hear the rest of what Squirrelly says because Foggy’s other hand has been secured, and he’s moved on to singing other sea shanties.  The raggedness of his voice stands in such contrast to the grotesqueries of torture.  Matt almost wishes Foggy would start screaming, because at least screaming makes sense. 

             “Why are you singing!?” Squirrelly breaks at last.  He punches the woodpile, and the vibrations let Matt know that he’s being pointed at, “You shut up too!  You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!”

            Matt stops playing games, “Whatever happens to me and Foggy tonight is nothing compared to what the devil will do to you.”

            Squirrelly breaks at long last, “What do you want me to do, man?  I’m dead!  They’ll kill me!”

            Foggy’s song is cut short by a long awaited scream, one that follows the sharp impact of wood against bones.  Squirrelly slaps his hands over his ears, trembling.  Matt basks in the sound.  Cigarettes is crying out in agony, through useless punches into the ether.  He screams a second time when his knee cracks against the floor as he goes down. 

            “You’re running out of time,” Matt informs him. 

            The sounds of the fight pick up.  Cigarettes takes most of Foggy’s initial blows, but Matt can hear Baritone desperately trying to insert himself into the violence.  Trying to take back control of the situation.  Foggy isn’t letting him.  He’s got too much rage and too few fingers to be overtaken so easily. 

            Matt pushes Squirrelly a little more, “It might be easier for you to help me now, before he has a chance to get back here.”  
  
            “That guy’s not the devil.”

            “No,” Matt admits, “but I’m not in a position to stop what he’s going to do.”   
  
            “What the hell can I do?”

            “Call the police.  Turn yourself in,” just a kid, probably his first major offence.  He’ll get off easy.  Matt almost tells him that he’ll have legal representation if he does, but Foggy doesn’t sound like he’s looking for new clients at the moment.  He sounds like he has Baritone in a lock and is aiming for the kidneys.  “End this.”  
  
            Squirrelly hangs onto his bravado for dear life, “I don’t have to do shit.”          
  
            Matt breaks it down into terms he understands: “You call the cops, you have a really good shot of striking a deal with the DA’s office for information on your employer.”  It’s a stretch that the kid knows anything, let alone that his employer’s big fish, but Matt doesn’t tell Squirrelly that.  “You don’t call the cops, and either my friend gets his hands on you, or the devil does.”  
  
            “They’ll kill me,” he moans. 

            “The devil’ll keep you alive,” Matt promises, “because the dead can’t suffer.”  
  
            The sharp tang of the crowbar slices through the air and lands one something wet.  Cigarettes screams again, this time flop-jawed and sopping wet with blood.  Matt gags on the smell.  He waits for the second blow to land on Baritone, hoping this is it.  The night is over.  “Where are our phones?” Matt demands.  “If you won’t tell me, you’re going to be telling Foggy.”

            “I don’t know.  I swear I don’t know.”

            Matt can’t tell if that’s true.  The kid’s heart is already thrumming out of his chest from fear.  He shifts his attention back to Baritone, who is conversing with Foggy strictly through punches.  Hard ones, by the sounds of it, assisted by the crowbar.  “I’m only going to ask you one more time-”

            “I swear I don’t know!” Squirrelly starts to break down.

            The tang of metal gets stronger.  Matt opens his mouth a little more to get the taste of it.  The crowbar cuts odd patterns into the air.  It’s joined by a smaller tool, something that leaves very little trace.  The box cutter.  Matt’s hand throbs fearfully, muscle memory providing him with a vivid flashback of nails being torn off his skin.   

            “Foggy-”

            The crowbar hits with a watery smack, and Baritone responds with a low, brutalized growl.  His body crumples, Matt can hear the muscles going limp, and he hits the ground, sending tremors through Matt’s legs and hands.  Sound vanishes, sucked straight out of the space, and Matt’s ears ring desperately to catch hold of new information.  He finally hears the satisfied clang of the crowbar on the ground and Foggy’s slow, victory march away from his assailants. 

            One of his legs sounds heavier than the other. 

            Matt’s tongue sops up the scent of blood like a sponge.  The smell crashes into his face, drowning his other senses.  “Foggy?” the name is crushed under another wave of blood.  His ears latch onto Cigarettes and Baritone’s slow and steady heartbeats in an effort to spare themselves, but that doesn’t mean Matt is unaware of the tachycardic staccato beat headed his way. 

            Adrenaline floods him.  Matt rises to his knees, “Foggy?”  The heartbeat is all over the place.  Blood rises up Matt’s neck in a hot rush.  “Foggy, talk to me.”

            “Oh, hell,” Squirrelly gets the hint.  He treads fearfully towards where Foggy’s limping and continues his terrified repetition of, “Hell, hell, hell, hell…”  
  
            “Call an ambulance,” Matt orders him.  Foggy’s foot squelches when it hits the floor, heavy with blood.  Matt clambers to his feet.  “Call an-” he can’t breathe.  “Call-“

            Squirrelly’s heart takes off just a second before his feet do.  He tears from the scene, slamming into the closed warehouse door.  After a few seconds, he unbolts it, and then he’s off and running into the night.

            Matt tears in what little air he can as he makes his way along the wood pile.  He hears Foggy’s steps come to a halt, but he can’t be sure of the distance.  The warehouse is too quiet.  His ears can’t extrapolate heart beats and heavy breathing into the idea of space.  There’s no echoes, just the fragile push and pull of air from his stubborn chest as he tugs himself closer, or at least what he hopes is closer.  Direction is easy; depth perception is damned difficult. 

            “I got ‘em,” Foggy wheezes at long last. 

            Matt’s brain fizzles to gray.  His senses sputter in relief: sounds fizzle, scents disperse, taste disappears, limbs go numb.  He stumbles, nearly falls.

            Foggy doesn’t move to help him.  It’s the scariest sound in the world, the absence of his friend leaping to his defence.  “Foggy,” Matt coughs, his friend’s name riding a mass of foamy blood from his mouth. 

            “I didn’t kill them…” Foggy doesn’t seem to have heard him, doesn’t even seem to be aware of Matt at all.  “…I wouldn’t kill them.  I just…hurt them…a little.  Psycho kind of clipped me near the end…little bit stabbed, not gonna lie.”

            Matt’s legs go out from under him.  He half-crawls along the floor, ignoring the pained shouts from his chest that _he can’t breathe like this_ and _you are both going to die if you don’t get up_.  The voice is oddly Stick-like in its ferocity.  “Shut up,” Matt tells him, Stick not Foggy, and just in case that’s not clear, he adds, “Foggy, talk to me.”

            His voice is all wrong through.  He doesn’t have the strength for consonant sounds.  The floor catches his face when he topples forward.  Matt bucks up, the weight of the floor on his chest cutting off his breathing again.  He has to get to Foggy.  Foggy is the only person that matters.  “Foggy…”

            “Good call with the lying down, Matt.  Naptime sounds…like a great idea…”  
  
            Foggy’s knees go limp.  He twists and slams into the floor, and the shockwaves from his impact help get Matt back on all fours.  He scampers the last eternities to Foggy, no longer caring that he isn’t breathing.  His hand plays over Foggy’s cold face.  The heartbeat, once energetic, starts to settle into silence.

 

* * *

 I'm sorry.

…Happy reading!(?)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.
> 
> I am not a medical professional, so this chapter is reflective of message boards and consultations with my mother, a nurse practitioner, who was both concerned and disgusted by the content of this fic. Apologies if there are any glaring inaccuracies. 
> 
> This chapter was supposed to mark the beginning of straight-up comfort, but Matt had other plans. On the bright side, that means there’s still two installments left before this fic is completed. 
> 
> Thank you so much for your patience, readers! Your support is greatly appreciated. Apologies for my abrupt absence. I hope this installment finds you well, and that you all have wonderful weeks ahead of you!

* * *

 

            Matt keeps one hand on Foggy’s face and drives the other down where the scent of blood is the thickest.  The wound looks like a volcanic eruption in his mind’s eye, a geyser of orange in a smoke-filled chamber.  He sinks his hand against Foggy’s abdomen and slips around, eventually finding the slice in the skin left by the box cutter.  Matt can’t smell bowel, but there’s a heavier scent in the air than just blood.  Something meaty, dense, akin to the tannins in red wine.  Matt doesn’t dare stick a finger in to find out.  He just drops more of his weight on the injury. 

            He still isn’t breathing.  He would go on not caring, but his brain is starting to misfire.  The world on fire cuts out.  His arms start to buckle.  “Foggy,” Matt begs soundlessly.  His lips move through the words even if his breath can’t.  “Hang on, Foggy.  Hang on.” 

            Briefly, Matt wonders what Foggy is hanging on to.  They’re alone.  Help isn’t coming.  Baritone or Cigarettes could wake up any second and finish them off regardless of their orders.  Foggy’s heartbeat slows to a near-silent crawl.  His temperature drops steadily, from yellow to red to black.

            Then the thought short-circuits.  Matt’s perception crackles to silence.  He pitches forward into Foggy’s bloody chest and passes out. 

* * *

           Footsteps thunder across the floor.  Weapons are holstered.  Unintelligible shouts direct the action.  Heartbeats rattle– all elevated, all anxious, all desperate to move, move, move – but the more Matt tries to piece through them, the more they blend together.  He’s searching for droplets of Foggy in an ocean of nobodies.

            And the waves, they keep rolling in: blood is everywhere.  His face, chest, and hands are caked with it.  He has to break the gory seal on his eyelids when he awakens.  Fresh air floods his mouth and nose, but the harder he tries to breathe, the more his lungs flap helplessly in his chest.  When he tries to sit up, the world crashes down on him, forcing Matt back under.  The only thing that helps is letting go, but he refuses to do that when he doesn’t know where Foggy is. 

             “You need…hold still,” Baritone’s voice rumbles in the distance.

            Matt’s whole body rallies behind the punch.  The motion sparks the fuse on several powder kegs in his chest; the ensuing explosions blot out awareness again.  He’s pinned down by the wrists and fights back to little effect. 

            “Hey, hey!” he knows that voice.  Why does he know that voice?  “Take it easy with him.  He’s blind.” the hand on his shoulder is grounding.  Matt tilts his head towards it, following the sound of the heartbeat out of his panic.  His body takes over where his brain fails so spectacularly.  So long as he doesn’t think about it, he can breathe enough to stay conscious.  The air streaming steadily at his face does most of the work.  “Matt?  It’s Brett.  We got you.  You’re going to be fine.  You gotta let the medics do their job, alright? 

            “Foggy…Foggy…” Matt begs him for information.  His voice sounds quiet even to his ears.  The air pounding against his face and the snap-clack-thump of the police and medics swallow up his plea.  His lungs ache hotly from the exertion, and Brett’s response is to simply squeeze his shoulder. 

            Noise slipstreams.  Voices strum against Matt’s skin.  He feels the heartbeats in his bones, all of them strong, hammering away in the darkness outside his eyes.  For a moment, he thinks he hears one that’s softer than the others, but his focus cuts out when the ground gives way.  Matt drops out of consciousness, and when he comes to again, an engine growls.  The ground vibrates in motion.  They’re in an ambulance.  Still, the sound of Foggy’s heartbeat is unmistakeable over all the activity around them.  

            Matt’s injured hand is closest, and while his fingertips are scalding, he pulls it free from the strap at his wrists to reach.  He tugs a breath from the tight swath of air around him to power the effort.  A body bumps against him, shooting a wave of fire up his forearm.  Matt strains.  He yanks another breath, listening hard.  The heartbeat slogs on.  “Foggy…”

            His bloody fingertips brush a cold, clammy limb.  The pain steals his tactility, so Matt can’t register a pulse.  He distrusts his ears suddenly.  Maybe it’s his heart he’s hearing, not Foggy’s.  He might be running his fingertips along a body bag. 

            Fingers wrap around Matt’s wrist and pull his hand away before he can find out.  He tries to fight back.  “FOGGY,” the name is a scratch on the burlap air.  His hand gets restrained again easily.  The impact of his fingertips against the gurney is too much.  He loses his grip on Foggy’s heart and fades out. 

            Consciousness returns with a cold shock.  Matt springs upright to escape the torpor of blare-boom-crash, and he’s sprung upon by hands, heartbeats, neoprene, and antiseptic.  He tears his hands out of their grasps to try and drown out the noise, but his left hand burns louder than the room. 

            Foggy.  Where the hell is he?  Matt can’t even smell his blood anymore.  He tries to call out, but he can’t get enough breath to speak. 

            He starts searching instead.  There are tubes everywhere.  His legs won’t move.  He can’t seem to get his lungs open and someone’s hand is on his face calling, “Matt!  Calm down!” The beeping splits his ear drums in two.  His head stings whiter and whiter and whiter until he thinks it might split too.  He tries to scream, but all he feels is the whimper of breath in his throat and the useless strain of his lungs. 

            A stabbing pain in his shoulder causes his diaphragm to drop, along with all the other muscles in his body.  The hands catch him as he collapses, every slackening inch of him, and Matt can’t help but fall.  It feels good to fall.  The frantic room melts into warm water, and he sinks into it.  Sounds get muffled, textures soften, tastes blunted.  His eyelids hurt from being open for so long; Matt closes them. 

            “That’s good,” the hand on his face lowers to his shoulder.  The touch is familiar, comforting.  Claire’s voice: “That’s good.  Just relax.”

            Air staggers into his lungs through his slightly parted lips.  “Foggy,” he wheezes.

            Nobody answers. 

* * *

            “Get up, Matty.  Get to work,” Dad prods him.   

  
            He’s already taken a good beating.  Echoes of punches dribble across his chest.  A patch of ribs crackles whenever he breathes.  There’s an itch under his arm, one that digs all the way to his lungs.  Matt can’t reach it.  His arms are leaden, and they don’t move where they’re supposed to.  Instead, the itch turned into a barb, prickling against his intercostal muscles. 

            Forget work.  “Tomorrow.  Before school,” but he can’t say the words.  His jaw and tongue flop independently of each other.  Dad understands and doesn’t listen, “Tonight, Matty.  Get up.”

            He has a friend to find.  Foggy’s not there.  Matt kicks the blankets off his legs.  He tears the mask off his face.  Hands reach out to his shoulders, pressing him back.  The voice that follows is insistent.  He answers with a cough – it hurts.  Broken ribs always hurt.  “Get up, Matty” – and he continues to move against them.  Whoever they are.  His radar’s all mugged up.  Wires crossed and misfiring.  “Get up, Matty,” Dad starts to sound like Stick, “What the hell is wrong with you, kid?  Get up.”

            Definitely Stick.  Matt finds his broken ribs with one hand.  He tries to pull the barb out of his chest with the other, but the fingers feel funny.  Heavy, swollen.  Bound.  He bites down on the fabric covering them and tries to pry it off.  More hands are on him.  “Get up, Matty,” Stick urges.  Matt obeys.  He always obeys.  There are other voices; he ignores them.  They’re so loud that he can’t make out what they’re saying.  He keeps fighting: kicks and squirms and coughs.  He needs to find Foggy.   

            “Matt!  Matt, you have to calm down,” Karen’s voice finally penetrates the haze.  “Matt, if you don’t…”

            They have her too.  Oh, God, they have her too.  Matt shudders from the aftershocks of his cough.  He didn’t fight early enough to save Foggy.  He has to save her.  Grabs the first wrist he can find and ends up shoved back against an uncomfortable mattress.  Tries to shove back, thinks he succeeds, and shoves harder with both hands.  The bandaged one strings.  Matt uses the pain to fight harder, just the way Stick taught him.

            A fire starts in his forearm and spreads through his body.  At first it’s too hot, then it’s too cold, and then it’s just right.  “Karen…” he catches her hand  “Karen, run…Karen…get the hell away from here….go…”

            The mask slips back over his face.  Pain diffuses.  He can still feel the itch inside of his chest. 

            “It’s okay, Matt,” Karen promises him.  Her voice has an echo.  Matt follows the sound as it dances away.  “You’re okay…”  
  
            But it’s not him he’s worried about.  That’s the problem.

* * *

            Hands on his wrists.  Matt attempts to escape, but his movement is limited to a few inches.  He uses the rest of his body to buck them.  The hands shift until he can feel fingers on his forearms.  Claire’s fingers. 

            Matt becomes aware of nothing else.  Every inch of his body goes numb.  His broken ribs only tickle when he takes a deep breath, and the itch in his chest prickles distantly, like it’s happening to someone else. 

            The world is quiet – peaceful quiet, not scary quiet.  She’s muted the monitors, leaving only the hum of electricity and the steady hiss of oxygen flow from his mask.  Matt keeps his mind from wandering too far beyond the room by fixating on her.  She breathes so beautifully.  The evenness is mesmerizing. 

            “Matt,” she keeps her voice at the perfect volume.  “I need you to listen to me.”  The threat of further sedation or restraint need not be spoken aloud.     
  
            His throat is painfully dry.  He almost can’t respond.  Unfortunately, nodding won’t work.  He can’t move his hands either.  “I’m listening,” he says while exhaling.

            “You’re in the hospital.”   
  
            “I got that.”   
  
            “You feel this?” she places a hand tenderly over the itch in his ribs.  Matt coughs his affirmation.  “This is a chest tube.  You have blood in your chest.  It was collapsing your lung.  This is draining the excess fluid.  We’ll be able to remove it eventually.  That won’t happen if you keep trying to pull it out.”

            Matt blinks in understanding.  Claire moves her hand just below his broken ribs.  She barely touches the skin and the proximity still sets off a quiet burst of pain.  Matt hisses; she inches her hand away, “You’ve got three broken ribs.  It’s going to hurt to breathe, but you have to keep breathing normally otherwise you could get an infection.  Make sure you cough too, even though that’ll hurt more.”

            Matt’s heard enough.  He lifts his head off the pillow.  The exertion makes his eyelids flutter.  He feels himself slipping out of consciousness.  His head falls back.  Matt draws a deep breath, the first in what feels like forever, and the pain in his ribs swells mutely.  Whatever they have him on is strong.  Directing his attention is impossible, so Matt ends up feeling everything at once: the scratchy blankets, the chest tube, broken bones, guilt, loss, concern. 

            “Where’s Foggy?” that’s the real issue.  His own physical discomfort is irrelevant.  “Where?”

            Claire sighs, “Can you worry about you, for once?”

            He doesn’t like that answer.  It sounds like a cop-out, a distraction.  Matt is almost exhausted enough to take the bait, but he can’t breathe not knowing.  If they’re not going to let him out of bed, Claire has to tell him.  “Where?” he asks again.

            Claire takes her sweet time with finding her response.  She has an answer ready, but the words aren’t quite right.  Her heart isn’t happy with what’s going to be said.  Matt bites down on his lower lip, shutting out the oxygen mask.  The pain escalates in his chest straight through the threshold of drugs, distracting him from tears.

            “Is that what this is?” Claire demands, seeing right through him.  “Are you withholding yourself from treatment to find out about your friend?”

            He drinks in a shuddering breath.  The move seems childish when she puts it like that.  “Tell me,” he urges her.

            “Foggy’s alive,” she assures him.  “He was stabbed in the abdomen.  He was lucky: the knife nicked his liver and almost caused him to bleed out.  They were able to repair the damage in surgery.  He’s holding on.  They’re…hopeful.”

            He wishes she used another adjective.  “They’re confident” means Foggy’s going to make it.  “They’re hopeful” is a generous way of saying he probably won’t.  Matt suspects he lets his disappointment show, since Claire takes hold of his uninjured hand.  “I will let you know if his condition changes,” Claire promises, “but you have to stop fighting, Matt.”

            Matt tries to pull his hand from hers.  He can’t surrender.  He got them into this mess; he has to be able to get Foggy out.  Fighting has to be enough.  “I didn’t…I didn’t fight…and I should have…” he forces his next breath all the way into his lungs to feel the burn of his broken ribs. 

            “You did what you had to do to protect your friend.”

            “You weren’t there.”   
  
            “I didn’t have to be.  I know you, Matt,” Claire risks placing her other hand into his hair.  He has nowhere to go, caught between Claire’s hands.  She knows exactly how to hold him.  “I know what it’s like to want to fight, but you aren’t saving Foggy this way.  You are just hurting yourself.”

            He wants to be smart with her.  “This tube is hurting me,” he rasps. 

            The way her fingers uncurl lets him know she heard.  Her tone – flat as hell – confirms, “You think Foggy is going to be happy to see you when he wakes up?  Yanking out your chest tube and messing with the expert dressings I put on your fingers?”

            She’s right.  She’s always right.  Matt doesn’t want to admit it.  He wants to cling to his delusion that getting out of the hospital bed is going to wake Foggy up.  He wants to make a deal, exchange his suffering for Foggy’s, his life for his friend’s.  God doesn’t do negotiation though.  He writes the contract, and there’s always a lot of fine print.

            As if she can hear his thoughts, Claire proposes a trade, “Get some rest.  I will keep you posted about Foggy.”   
  
            “Thank you.”

            “Rest,” she insists.  Matt appeases her by closing his eyes.  Claire doesn’t fall for it, knowing full well that eyes closed or eyes open, his mind is still working.  She exhales through her nose in dismay.  He expects her to storm away when her heart skips a beat.  Her hand suddenly appears around his ear.  She sweeps her fingers through his hair. 

            The motion disarms him.  Matt’s senses stop their endless sweeping of the hospital room and affix themselves to the simple motion of her touch.  He breathes deeply, and the rise and fall of his pain turn into a meditative rhythm that keeps perfect time with Claire’s fingers. 

            “I’m glad you’re alright.”

            Matt’s thoughts are all drifty.  He wants to thank her, but he has more on his mind than just gratitude, “I hope Foggy is too.”

            Claire says more, but he’s gone back to listening to the rest of the hospital, wondering whether he’ll recognize Foggy’s heartbeat when he finds it.  His efforts are too much too soon.  Matt spreads himself so thin that he becomes a passive receiver for all the noise in Metro-General.  Only Claire’s touch registers, and he follows her spiralling finger into sleep. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More on Foggy and the arrival of the NYPD in the next chapter. 
> 
> Happier reading!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.
> 
> Between the heart-wrenching, soul-destroying Hannibal finale and being back to work this week, I had to chip away at this chapter paragraph by paragraph. I really appreciate everyone’s patience and the kind, wonderful support I’ve received for this fic. It’s been fun writing a multi-chapter fic again, and I hope you all have enjoyed the ride! One more chapter after this, an epilogue, and then the Devil’s Work is done. 
> 
> Readers, thank you. A thousand times over. I say it every time I post, and I’ll say it again with every new installment. I so appreciate you kind patronage, and I do hope you’re finding everything that you need in the fandom. Cheers!

* * *

 

            Foggy’s cheek is cold beneath his bloody fingers and Matt can’t hear his heartbeat and this is his fault again.  “Foggy?  Foggy,” he begs the dying firelight in his mind’s eye, the one that’s confused whether he’s in a warehouse or a rain-soaked alley.  This all feels so familiar.  “Foggy, say something…” 

            “Matt?”

            “…sounds like Karen.”

            “That’s because it is Karen.”

            “Feels like Foggy,” dead Foggy.  Silent Foggy.  Matt doesn’t know if he’s tasting tears or saline.  He fumbles his uninjured hand around dead-Foggy’s face some more and finds Karen’s hand waiting for him.  “I’m sorry.” 

            Karen clutches his hand like a wounded animal, “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

            “But Foggy…” he doesn’t know how to explain Foggy’s cold face and empty chest, that silence less the absence of sound and more a cold needle needling down his spine.  Matt tightens his grip on her hand.  He’s suddenly aware that the air is too stable for the warehouse, that the temperature is regulated, and Foggy’s corpse has disappeared, replaced by a sheet of steel wool. 

            He tries to focus, get a better sense of this place that isn’t the warehouse, but his senses are all buffered, muggy.  He can’t smell anything beyond the bombardment of oxygen to his nostrils, and his sense of taste plays tricks on him, flittering between antiseptic, cheap soap, salt water, neoprene, and ethanol from floral shampoo.  His ears are better attuned to the unnatural moans and groans of his broken body.  There’s a rock crushing into his ribs when he breathes.  Beyond that, nothing.

            Karen squeezes his hand in response to his rising panic, “How are you feeling?”

            “Better question is what am I feeling,” Matt admits, but that question is even harder to answer, “which is not a whole lot.”  His broken ribs still hurt, a solid sign that he’s breathing properly.  “Did they-” he recalls the swarm of army ants chewing their way into his chest below his arm.  He feels a faint prickle of sensation near his lungs when he breathes, but nothing more.  “Did they take out the chest tube?”  
  
            “No, it’s still there.  You kept trying to tear it out.  Your friend – Claire? – she gave you a local while you were sleeping.”  
  
            “That’s good.”  
  
            “She seems nice.”  
  
            The disappointment simmers below the surface of her voice.  Matt can’t help but hear it, tremulous and pained, “She is,”

            Tough contest as to who is less equipped to deal with their emotions.  Karen abandons her inquiry out of self-preservation, “Uh…she checked in on Foggy before coming to see you.  Neither of us…we didn’t want to wake you up though.”  
  
            Matt anticipates panic, but his body doesn’t deliver.  His pulse remains infuriatingly steady, a regimented march, while thought float through his mind just out of reach.  The question sits heavily on his tongue.  If he asks, he’ll know, and he only wants to know if it’s good news.  If not, Matt doesn’t have the strength to survive the blow.

            He holds onto the thought that they would wake him for bad news.  Maybe.  “Is Foggy…” Matt stutters, eyes watering.  A third spot of pain opens up inside his chest.  “Is Foggy okay?”

            Karen sighs, “Yeah, Matt.  Foggy’s okay.  Well, he’s going to be okay.”   

            Tears run hot against his face.  Matt can’t help himself.  He feels breathless again, ribs freshly broken, air knocked clean out of his chest.  Karen’s hand wanders between his face and his uninjured hand.  Matt tries to get to the tears before she does, but he only has his injured hand to work with.  The bandages make him clumsy, and they press down on his open nail beds.  “I’m sorry,” Christ, this is embarrassing.  “It’s the meds…I can’t...”

            “No, Matt, you have nothing to be sorry for.”  
  
            He smiles a little, liking the edge in her voice.  Karen Page, intrepid investigator, out for truth and consequences, “I have a little to be sorry for.”  Just nothing he can admit to her. 

            “Matt, don’t,” Karen begs him.  “You and Foggy had a hell of a night.  But you are going to be okay.  Foggy is going to be okay.”

            Matt breathes another sigh of relief.  He doesn’t even mind the storm from his broken ribs or the coughing fit that follows.  He can definitely feel the chest tube now, and since he can’t shift his focus to other sensations, Matt is barely aware of Karen rubbing his back. 

            Foggy is okay.  He’s going to be okay. 

            “Can I talk to him?” Matt asks as he sinks back onto the rock-solid bed. 

            Karen fumbles with…some things, Matt can’t tell what, and suddenly there’s a straw next to his lips.  His throat is raw and chest is awful enough that he takes a drink without asking.  The water wakes him, breaks up the awful muzzling of his senses.  The floodgates on his perception open.  Hospital room, heart monitor, IV, gurney, Karen, doorway, hallway, chatter and clatter: Matt welcomes it all like an old friend.  He almost doesn’t hear Karen reply, “Soon.  Apparently, he’s still really out of it.”

            “More than me?”

            She laughs breezily, “More than you.  God, I’m so glad you two are okay.”

            Matt is too.  He keeps tracking the hospital for Foggy sounds, but he trusts Karen.  Trusts Claire.  They’re all going to be alright.  “What about the men who attacked us?”

            Karen’s laugh is wicked, bitter, but it’s all bark and no bite.  The taste of tears is thick on the air once more.  “One’s in a coma,” she taps a furious rhythm on the bedrail with her fingernail.  “The other has a broken jaw.”  
  
            “There was a third.”  
  
            “Not at the scene.”

            Squirrelly’s getaway echoes into oblivion through Matt’s mind.  “There was a third.  Just a kid.  Nervous,” he gets the sense that Karen might leap out of her chair and start scouring Hell’s Kitchen for the guy.  Matt places his uninjured hand on hers, holding her in place.  “He ran out just after Foggy…” the air hisses when it passes through his teeth.  He can still hear Cigarettes’s jaw breaking and the box cutter slashing through Foggy’s stomach.   Matt has to remind himself, “I’m glad Foggy’s going to be okay.”  
  
            “Me too,” Karen agrees quietly.

            The thought settles Matt.  He isn’t sure why; it must be the meds causing him to oscillate between calm and alert.  “Is Officer Mahoney here?”  
  
            “He was.”  
  
            “Can you get him, Karen, please?  I’d like to give him my statement.”

            He’s almost positive she’s going to say no.  Matt has a good feeling that he doesn’t look ready to give a statement.  His chest doesn’t sounds ready either.  Still, Brett needs to know about Squirrelly, er…the Kid, because Matt is a long way’s away from tracking him down.  Too long away not to give Brett a head start.   

            Karen agrees with his thinking, since she gets up from her chair, “Yeah, sure.” 

            “Thank you, Karen,” he hopes she can tell he’s grateful for more than just getting Officer Mahoney. 

            The way she clutches his hand once more before leaving tells him she does. 

* * *

            Matt thinks he knows how unprepared he is to speak with Brett: he doesn’t.  The full degree of his exhaustion rapidly becomes apparent after the first few questions.  The local wears off, giving him the sensation of flesh peeling away from his bones where the chest tube lingers.  His hand bobs on and off the bed, because the pain of ripping the damn thing out would be so, so satisfying after it prickling all of his nerve endings. 

            The prickling is louder than the sound of his voice, especially as Matt gets to Foggy’s last stand.    

            “Look, Murdock, we can do this later,” not a single broken rib or tube in his chest, and Brett is begging Matt for mercy.  He keeps nudging his foot towards the door to get Karen from the hallway. 

            “No, no, you’ve got to find him,” Matt scrambles for meditative focus.  What he finds is the painful throb of his broken ribs, the ones that make it harder and harder to breathe normally against their weight.  Matt crawls back into his head and wills himself to relax, “He said he was from Long Island.  He sounded really young.”

            “He sounds like the 9-1-1 caller,” Brett replies. 

            None of his injuries can drown that out.  “What?” Matt asks. 

            “Dispatch received an anonymous tip that there was screaming coming from a warehouse on Pier 98.”  
  
            “Where was the call placed?”

            “A bar couple blocks from where we found you and Nelson.  The bartender described some young guy coming in and rushing out after he made the call.”

            Matt can’t stop his uninjured hand from balling into a fist.  Foggy almost died.  He could still die.  Squirrelly’s good deed buys him only so much mercy from the mask, “I can ID his voice from the recording at dispatch.”  

            And then find him and ask him who his employer is.  Nicely. 

            Brett puts the quest for answers to rest quickly, “When you get out of here.  We’ve got the other two.  They’re not going anywhere.”  His heart rate accelerates in anticipation of his next question.  Matt can’t help getting keyed up too.  “Speaking of, you want to tell me how they got like that?”  
  
            Brett doesn’t need to ask; the evidence is clear as to how that happened.  Still, Matt gets the sense that he needs confirmation.  Two men beaten half to death is exactly the kind of excessive force the DA could use to level an attempted murder charge on Foggy.   

            Karen is in the hallway, heels tapping in an elliptical orbit outside the door.  Matt is happy she’s not in the room for this part.  Foggy acted in self-defence, but Matt is more than aware of how his friend feels about Karen.  They’re sharing enough darkness between them that Matt doesn’t need her to know what Foggy can do with a crowbar.

            “They were breaking Foggy’s fingers,” Matt can’t stop his jaw from trembling on the last syllable.  He can still hear his friend screaming with pitch perfect clarity.  “All of a sudden, I heard two wet slaps.  Bodies hit the floor.  And I found Foggy on the ground…stabbed in the stomach.” 

            He shuts his mouth and forces air in and out of his nose, no longer caring if his lungs are filling to capacity or not.  God, he hurts.  Worse than being ambushed by the Russians.  Worse still than the beating he received from Nobu and Fisk.  Matt hurts in new places, deep places.  He wants to talk to Foggy, confirm that his friend is alright.  He doesn’t want to think about Foggy being taken to court and tried for attempted murder.  He doesn’t want to be holed up in a hospital bed with a tube dragging on his ribcage without knowing who did this to them. 

            “Murdock, just calm down,” Brett tells him for the umpteenth time.  The officer has shifted position in the room to be closer to the door.  “You want me to get a nurse for you?”

            “No, no, I’m good,” he isn’t, but at least he’s starting to sound it again.  Matt’s breath becomes a fuzzy crawl in and out of his chest.  “Agh, I’m good.  I’m good…”

            “Uh huh,” Brett’s heart settles into a knowing rhythm or at least a resigned one.  “Look, I think I have everything I need here.  I’ll be in touch if we find the kid.”  
  
            The goodbye seems too quick.  “Brett,” Matt can’t believe he gets a free pass on calling the officer by his first name.  He must look that bad.  “Whatever Foggy did…”  
  
            Brett stops him, “Off the record – and I mean really _off the record_ – whatever Nelson did, those guys had coming.  They went looking for the devil of Hell’s Kitchen, and they got the devil’s due.” 

            Matt groans despite himself.  All that sounds like the best-worst news.  “What about on the record?”  
   
           “On the record, this is self-defence.  My report will reflect that.”

            “Thank you,” Matt says, even though it makes him sound guilty. 

            “Don’t mention it,” Brett replies, because it does make him sound guilty.  “Get some rest, Murdock.”

            He wants to, but he can’t, not until Karen fetches a nurse who administers another dose of a local anesthetic around his chest tube.  The sensation that his ribs have turned to stone is a greater relief than the itch roving through his thoracic cavity.  Matt’s mind slingshots itself straight past meditation into sleep, this time mistaking his own heartbeat for Foggy’s in the dark. 

* * *

            The door to his hospital room slams shut. 

            Matt springs out of bed and onto the defensive so fast he nearly takes the monitors with him.  Chaos follows.  His focus gets caught in the snarls of tubes and wires ensuring his continued breathing; of his limbs clattering against the bed rail because he doesn’t remember being at the hospital; of his circulatory system looking to make a mass exodus through his skin.  There’s pain, there’s ringing, there’s a foreign heartbeat (not Karen.  Karen’s gone.  Where’s Karen?); hands that aren’t his, a ragged voice (also not Matt’s), and he’s almost on the floor when he finally gets his bearings.

            Breathe.  Just breathe.  Let it in, let it go.  Weird, but the wheezing sounds don’t go away even when Matt forces his lungs to work properly.  In fact, the wheezing doesn’t sound to be coming from him at all.  They’re coming from that second heartbeat, the one clouded with the scent of blood, plaster, and iodine.  Matt’s fight response starts to wane the more sensory details pour in.  He knows that smell, that heartbeat, and that ragged breathing on an almost cellular level. 

            “Foggy?” the darkness in front of his eyes is unforgiving.  Matt can’t shake the feeling that this is a nightmare.  He’s going to wake up and Claire is going to be talking him calmly off the ledge of his subconscious.  Or she’s going to stand there wheezing, smelling and sounding exactly like, “Foggy?” 

            The air picks up with lazy gestures, a hand waving in lieu of stubborn vocal chords.  Matt reaches with his uninjured hand towards the figure.  He feels another hand wrap around his, and then a familiar thumb scribbles on the back of his hand.  “Foggy!” Matt grips at him, “Should I call a doctor?  Do you want me to…” he can’t find his panic button with his bandage, mangled fingers.  The bed starts jumping under him, sending extra shocks of pain through his chest.  “Agh, geez…”  
  
             “Stop…” Foggy tugs a little on Matt’s hand. “You’re going…to hurt yourself…more…and no…no doctors.  I’m kind of…not supposed to be…out of bed.”

            “You escaped from your room?”

            “Anything…you can do…I can…do…better…” Foggy moans on his way into the plastic hospital chair Karen once occupied.  His legs make the plastic chair legs squeak against the floor tiles.  Weakness changes the quality of air in the room, giving it the countenance of a frightened pet.  “Seriously, buddy, how the hell do you do this?”  
  
            “I don’t do it when I’ve been stabbed,” Matt absorbs the spear of Foggy’s pulse against his fingertips.  They’re both facing down hurt – pissed off and snarling – that the meds can’t fix.     
  
            “No, you just come to work.  Pretend to be invincible.  Badly.  Oh, my God, this is agony!  Work!  Work, drug pump!  WORK!” Foggy jabs at the machine and all of a sudden his heart rate enters a nosedive.  The rapid stab against Matt’s hand turns into a gentle pulse.  His words slurs, “Oh, sweet Jesus.  Pumpkin pie.  Homemade waffles.  Mmm…waffles… What were we talking about, breakfast?”

            “No, Foggy,” Matt feels his best friend’s hand drop out of his.  He resumes his clumsy search for the call button.  Not that he wants Foggy to leave, but a chair can’t be the best place for his friend to sleep either.

            “I was really worried about you,” Foggy breathes.  “Thought you were dead.  And the doctors just kept saying to worry about me.  It was annoying. Do you know…” Foggy’s voice drifts away but then comes back with renewed vigor, “Do you know how many hospital rooms I went into before I found yours?  Way more than I would have if they told me where you were.”

            “I don’t think they were planning on you walking around.”

            “Joke’s on them,” Foggy laughs.  He raises his voice, “I found him!  I found Matt Murdock!  And I didn’t rip my stitches or mess up my busted fingers to do it!  I should get a prize…Karen did buy me a stuffed animal, but I can’t remember where my room is, so it’s lost forever.”

            Matt lets his hand fall off the bedrail, not sure if he’s found the call button or not.  All he knows is that he’s crumbling, inside and out.  “It is really good to hear your voice, Foggy,” the swell of deep breaths and brush of machines fills him with a sense of calm no matter how dark his thoughts become.  “I really thought you were gone this time.”  
            “I thought you were gone,” Foggy says.

            “I’m sorry for…”

            “SHHH!  Shhh…” Foggy’s hand flops over his face, dislodging his nasal cannula and setting off some of the bruises left by Cigarettes’s ringed fists.  Matt winces and tries to dodge out of the way, but Foggy keeps patting his teary cheeks in a drugged effort to soothe him.  It’s more funny than painful.  “This is nobody’s fault except the people who took us.  And their employer.  And the bastards who haven’t invited a machine to transfer a person’s consciousness out of a stabbed body into a not-stabbed one.”

            Matt shifts until Foggy’s fingers are curled next to his cheek instead of in his eyes.  He fixes his nasal cannula, “I should have ended it before you got stabbed.”  
  
            Foggy pokes him in the ear for emphasis, “Should've, would've, could've.”

            “Foggy…”

            “Even if you could go back in time – which you can’t,” and Foggy would know because, by the sounds of things, he has tried, “you would either have outed…you know… _you_ , or you would have had to kill them.”  
  
            “I was going to if they hurt you.”

            “They did hurt me.  I think…hard to tell…”

            More blood-scent fills the air.  Matt focuses and realizes what Foggy’s doing, “Stop poking at your stab wound.”

            “Sorry.” 

            “Don’t apologize, just…just don’t poke at it,” Matt gets the phantom sensation of his chest tube poking at him.  The feeling derails his train of thought.  Thankfully, Foggy lets his broken fingers drop into his waist a second later.  “You don’t deserve this, Foggy.”

            “Oh, and you do?”

            “No, that’s not…”

            “Because I will wander back to my hospital room right now, Murdock.”

            “You don’t even know where that is.”

            “Conjecture!”  
  
            “You just admitted to that!”  
  
            “Objection!”

            Matt tries to play along, “Overru-”

            Foggy beats him to the punch, “Sustained!  Matt Murdock declared not-guilty in a court of his peers.  Peer.  Peers!  My vote counts for Karen.”

            Matt’s stuck in a weird mire of sad and happy still, wishing there was some way to make this better and understanding there’s nothing to be done.  Foggy, whose thoughts are closer to the moon than they are to the hospital room, can still pick up on things, “What happened to us is wrong, Matt.  And it scared…it _scares_ the hell out of me.  And there’s very little justice in the aftermath.  We’re all just alone, suffering, existentialism, Sartre, French, French toast…look,” even he notices he’s getting off-track.  “We must dissent from the fear, the hatred, the mistrust.”

            For perhaps the first and only time in his life, Matt laments, “Not Marshall…” he wants his responsibility, clings to it even.  Foggy is suffering because of him. 

            “I thought I lost you.  You thought you lost me.”  
  
            “I should have fought…”  
  
            “You did,” Foggy contends, “but there’s no winning in a fight like this, Matt.  Can we at least agree that we lost less than the other guys?”

            Matt feels like he’s giving away a lot more than he means, but he doesn’t have the strength to fight, “Yes.” 

            “And that we’re going to get through this?”

            “Yes.”  
  
            “Good,” Foggy shifts in his seat, “now shhh.  I’m trying to sleep.”

            “Not in the chair, Foggy,” Matt tries to sit up, but he can’t lift himself more than a couple of inches before falling back.  His body is a mess.  The bruises have had time to swell, and they’re competing with the chest tube and his broken ribs as to who can hurt the loudest.  “Where is the call button?”

            “Quiet, Roomie,” Foggy shoves his hand back over Matt’s face.  “You had a long day.  Get some rest.  Re-e-e-st…”

            A few deep breaths, and Foggy goes limp.  His hand drags over Matt’s face onto the pillow, where is stays bundled up next to Matt’s bruised cheek.  The sound of his heartbeat echoes through Matt’s skull, in one ear and out the other, and Matt feels his own heart entraining to the tempo.

            “I’m really glad you didn’t die,” Foggy tells him. 

            Matt almost laughs.  Almost.  It’s so simple, too simple, in fact, considering what they’ve both been through, what they’re still going through.  Still, he agrees, “I’m glad you didn’t die too.”  
  
            “That’s sort of like a win, right?  I mean, depending on what we do with our lives after this?”  
  
            Matt isn’t quite so sure, but he likes the way Foggy thinks, “You really shouldn’t sleep in the chair.”

            “I don’t want to sleep anywhere else.  Nightmares.  Lots of nightmares, Matt.  Dumb bastards breaking my fingers over and over again.” 

            There.  That’s why this doesn’t feel like a win.  Matt presses his face against Foggy’s hand, “I’m sorry.” 

            “Not guilty,” Foggy mumbles, words garbled.  “We’ll get through this.  Say it with me: we will get through this.”  
            Matt forces himself to say it, “We are going to get through this.”

            And when they do, there’s going to be hell to pay for whoever set this up.    

 

* * *

 

Happy reading!

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Matt and Foggy are captured by some underworld cronies looking to catch the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. The irony of the situation is not lost on them. They’re just sorry they can’t let their captors know that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.
> 
> Okay, this is the last apology I have to post because this fic is finished. Finished! I am putting the finishing touches on the epilogue. Yes, the epilogue that was supposed to be posted a chapter ago. Writing is funny that way. It will be posted tonight!
> 
> I am so, so sorry this took so long to finish. I have been back at work, back at the gym, running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I didn’t have the concentration to dedicate to these chapters. 
> 
> Readers, lovely readers, dear readers – your support has meant so much to me. It has really helped me through these past couple weeks of agonizing over this installment while I’ve been back at work. I am so happy to have had you along for the ride. I really hope you like these final chapters. Thank you. A thousand times, thank you! Enjoy!

* * *

 

Nine

 

            Psycho breaks his fingers one, two, three, four, five and then unbreaks them five, four, three, two, one – over and over, in an endless loop, and Foggy can’t scream, can’t cry, can’t fight back, though he feels all three impulses occupying his body.  The scream rises like a fist from his throat only to crumble into silence through his gaping lips.  His other hand hangs uselessly at his side, because this is hell.  This is a circle of hell designed just for him.

            He follows the sound of his scream into consciousness.  Psycho comes with him, taking a stand on the opposite side of the room.  Foggy’s heart leaps into his mouth while all his blood drains into his feet.  He kicks the blankets off and throws his hands to defend himself. 

            His lamp hits the floor.

            His splinted fingers hit the nightstand.

            “FUCK!” Foggy raises his hand against the pain.  The blood flows back into his arm, but that doesn’t stop his mangled digits from throbbing.  One, two, three, four, five – he winces against the memory.  Clamping his uninjured hand against his forehead is a bracing maneuver.  He can’t get his pulse to slow or his bones to stop shaking.  Still, Foggy situates himself inside his bedroom, alone, alive: on the road to recovery, one broken finger at a time.

            His waist hurts.  Not badly – thanks, narcotics – but bad enough that even after his body relaxes, Foggy doesn’t bother trying to go back to sleep.  He crawls out of bed, staggers into the living room, and drops onto his couch in front of infomercials.  They lull him into a doze, but he wakes back up when a Miracle Blade pops out of his abdominal wound.  Psycho’s hanging onto his throbbing fingers counting like a demented nursery rhyme, “One, two, three-“  Meanwhile, Matt bucks in the corner.  “Can’t breathe…can’t breathe…”  
  
            For the second time, Foggy ends up slamming his broken fingers into something.  In this case, it’s the couch, which shouldn’t hurt, but it fucking does.  It fucking _hurts_.  And when he sits straight up, his stomach hurts too. 

            “FUCK,” he can’t think of anything else to say.  All the words on the tip of his tongue belong to other people: Psycho’s counting, Matt’s desperate pleas for air, singing.  He will never sing that _Pirates of Penzance_ song ever again.  Not ever.  He sees his life as an endless progression of aftermath, time measured against a night that springs, unbidden, from his memory in sharp, jagged fragments.  What he can’t recall explicitly is muscle memory: flinching at sudden noises, flailing out of bed, slamming his broken fingers into things.  He is a long way from the warehouse, but his body can’t shake the feeling that threats are creeping out of the woodwork. 

            Foggy staggers around in search of his phone, finding it in the pocket of an older pair of pyjamas.  Matt’s taken up calling or stopping by in the middle of the night, antsy, no doubt, from his inability to prowl rooftops and beat up baddies.  His presence comes with the added benefit of keeping the nightmares at bay.  Foggy spends a few shaky minutes composing a text that amounts to “I’m not going to say I need you, but, dude, I need you,” and then fails to send it off because he doesn’t need Matt.  He is a grown-ass adult with a law firm and everything.  He doesn’t need his best friend to come sit with him and chase away nightmares. 

            Except that he totally needs that, so Foggy ends up sending a noncommittal, “Hey,” instead, testing the waters.  Matt would come if called, but he’s still in recovery too.  He’s taken to moving in slow motion, since quick actions cause the blood to drain from his face and his breath to come in short gasps.

            There’s no immediate response – sleeping, Foggy tells himself.  Matt is just sleeping – so Foggy abandons the rather foolish plan of baiting his bestie into company.  He could text Karen?  No, he’d rather not.  Karen has been such a huge help already.  She got him and Matt in the same hospital room, played den mother for them after their release from the hospital, and has kept the office afloat, scrounging up support from the neighbourhood for the two tortured lawyers.  She’s seen Foggy Nelson in such unflatteringly vulnerable ways it’ll be a miracle if they can forge a friendship that’s halfway normal let alone something more than that. 

            He shoots off another text to Matt to tell him not to worry, he was just awake and wanted to check on Matt because Matt is the one he’s concerned about.  Because the guy who goes twelve rounds with a ninja and criminal kingpin is also going to let nightmares, flashbacks, and a standing state of panic bother him.  Then Foggy trundles back to the couch to late night prayer channels.  The televangelist prays for a woman with an ingrown toenail, a man with stomach problems, and a nameless, genderless individual having a crisis of faith.

            All the while, Foggy wonders why Matt hasn’t texted him back.  Can’t shake the thought, actually.  Matt doesn’t sleep that lightly, and he’s made a point of being there since they got released from the hospital.  Foggy takes up his phone and types, “Where are you?”

            He doesn’t send it.  The answer leaves him with a sick feeling, a clammy palm wrapping around his liver and tugging.  Matt is not ready to be doling out punches.  And who is he doling out punches to?  The Kid is still MIA – unless the devil found him; Muscles is drinking through a straw, so mission accomplished!  No vengeance needed there; and Psycho, last Foggy heard, is still comatose.

            “You still can’t breathe, Matt,” Foggy hisses into the dark. 

            The televangelist calls for New York to come together and pray.  Foggy turns the t.v. off and sits in the dark, waiting for the shadows he knows are coming.

* * *

            The mask makes it easy to forget that his chest still creaks and that he can’t breathe too much, too fast, too soon.  That he can take out a room full of thugs in the search of one dumb kid without feeling it.  He will have a hard time remembering in the morning, when he wheezes his way back to work.  For now, though, the momentum is such that he can jump a person in absolute silence and focus on the heartbeat he last heard racing away as Foggy lay dying. 

            Squirrelly has not learned his lesson.  Sold his services to a group of tough guys who will do the dirty work for him.  Got himself spotted by people who will say anything to keep their arms from being broken.  He cowers when the power gets cut.  “It’s him.  It’s him!  I told you, it’s him!” his palms scrape along the brick, searching for a hiding place. 

            One of his accomplices barks at him to shut up.  “Nobody’s seen the devil, not since you and your guys-”

            An uppercut to the jaw silences him before he’s thrown back against the wall.  Usually silence is an ally.  Tonight, however, noise is allowed, just enough that Squirrelly can hear his cadre of human shields getting picked off one by one.  His pulse is a beacon, and the faster it goes, the brighter the fire burns until the room is an atomic blast. 

            He tries to run, gets caught, and is slammed up against the wall.   Twice.  Three times.  “Who hired you to kidnap the lawyers?” Squirrelly screams and has a fit: kicking and waving like a child.  He gets slammed against the wall again and falls limp, terrified.  “WHO!?”  
  
            “I don’t know.  I don’t know!  I swear I don’t know!” Squirrelly weeps openly.  His tears explode against the brick, filling the air with salt and mortar.  “I came on at the last minute.  I never knew who for!”  
  
            “Who knew?”

            Fear makes a menace of his heartbeat, but Squirrelly isn’t lying, “God, I don’t know!  They never said!  Please, please!  I called the ambulance, alright?  I made sure the cops found them!  I did that!  That has to mean something!”  
   
           “It does,” not much.  Enough that Squirrelly is released before something gets broken.  “You are going to hand yourself into the police.  You won’t take a deal from the DA.  You will accept whatever charges they level against you.”

            “Just kill me!”

            “NO!” Squirrelly weeps.  “I want you to live knowing I’m waiting for you on the outside.”

            Squirrelly does not need to be told twice.  He is released, hits the ground running, and scampers through the dark to the door.  He doesn’t need to be followed to end up at the precinct in front of Officer Mahoney, ready to be put in handcuffs. 

            The world on fire rages on.   

* * *

             Matt aches all the way back to his apartment.  It’s not his ribs that hurt, it’s something deeper.  Immaterial.  A vestigial organ that serves no other possible function than to remind him there is much to be done.  Get up, Matty.  You’ve got work to do.  Only the real work is lying in a hospital bed unconscious with an ABI, and Matt doesn’t fault Foggy for a second.  He just wishes Baritone would get over the crowbar so he could get under the devil’s fists a little. 

            He checks the time: a little after six.  No point in going to sleep even if his chest is killing him.  He ignores the three new messages on his phone, showers and dresses and heads to the office.  He can get an hour or so in before Karen and Foggy show up and they all agree _again_ that they’ve hit a dead end in the hunt for whoever ordered them tortured. 

            There’s a heartbeat and staggered footsteps when he arrives.  Matt leaves his hand to rest on the door handle a moment.  Between his throbbing brain and plodding chest (or his plodding brain and throbbing chest – truly, both work), he’s having a hard time placing the name of his best friend.  Squirrelly is a dead end, Baritone can’t be questioned, and they are no closer to finding out who arranged for this to happen to them.  He should go home.  Neither Karen nor Foggy will fault him for burying his head in the sand.

            Foggy makes the decision for him.  “It’s open!” he calls, the creaky hallway floors having given Matt away.  His welcoming, halfway-jovial tone disappears the second the door is opened.  “Buddy, go home.  Now, quickly, before Karen sees you.  She is not going to let you stay at the office looking like that.”  
  
            Matt opens his mouth to say something cheeky, but the only thing that comes out is what feels like several tonnes of air.  He hasn’t been breathing normally, and his body has chosen now to inform him that’s a big problem.  Foggy’s heartbeat jumps, because he thinks that he’s winning.  Matt gets his second wind from the smells in the room.  “You can’t be looking so great yourself,” he laughs breezily.  Underneath the smell of Foggy’s shower, Matt can still detect perspiration and agitation.  Foggy might have gotten less sleep than he did. 

            “I am looking fantastic.  Woke up early this morning, so I tried something new with my hair-“

            “Not letting it dry before coming into the office?” the damp prickles in Matt’s nose. 

            Foggy deflates.  His voice levels into a flat line, “You’re one to talk.” 

            “I wanted to get a head start today,” it’s close enough to the truth that Foggy can’t know the difference. 

            Yet Foggy does know the difference.  He always does.  “I couldn’t sleep either,” he admits.  “I mean I wasn’t out pummeling criminals or anything-“

            “Foggy.”  
  
            Matt can’t breathe.  No, he can’t breathe _well_.  Matt has to remind himself to keep from panicking.  All his training with Stick has unravelled since that night when it comes to his breath.  He can forget when he’s fighting, but Foggy always manages to bring out the truth in him. 

            “You’re not ready to be out there,” Foggy insists.

            “I can’t afford not to be,” Matt adjusts his breathing to four counts, then five, then six, then continues speaking.  “The devil of Hell’s Kitchen has been off the streets for too long.  People are starting to take advantage.  Besides,” Matt has to use his cane to find his office.  The room feels distorted since he can’t focus beyond his breathing, “the NYPD is going to call with our third captor in custody.” 

            Foggy runs a hand through his hair, sighing, “Well, that’s…good, I guess.  Does he have anything special to tell the NYPD about who hired him?”  
  
            Matt tucks his cane behind his desk, sets down his briefcase, and comes back to stand in the doorway of his office.  He miscalculates and ends up bashing his shoulder, wincing from the spike of pain in his chest.  “No,” he says.  “No, he doesn’t know anything.”

            “So we’ve got two out of three conscious and in custody who don’t know anything.  One still in a coma who might know something.  A smattering of text messages that all go down the chain of command, not up.  The assurances from the warden that Fisk hasn’t received any visitors or place any calls since his incarceration,” which means nothing, and they both know if, but that doesn’t mean it means something either.  Foggy taps his foot thoughtfully, “I can see why we both thought coming to work early was a great idea.”

            Matt nods.  He can feel Foggy’s sense of hopelessness filling up the room.  “We lost less than the other guys,” Matt notes. 

            Foggy scoffs, hating the sound of his own words but not discounting them.  “We are still here,” he offers in agreement. 

            “And so is the person who did this,” Matt feels his strength coming back to him.

            “We’ll find them?” Foggy asks.

            “Yeah, Foggy, we’ll find them.” 

            The charge in the office starts to dissipate.

            “Sorry I missed your texts,” Matt adds.  The way Foggy’s heart flutters tells him exactly what’s in those messages.  Humility is hard to hide these days.  “Do you want to talk about it?”      

            “There’s nothing much to say.”

            That’s a bold-faced lie and they both know it, but they’ve both fortified their defences in the wake of what’s happened.  After Foggy’s release, they spent a few days together, between each other’s apartments: patching up their wounds and supervising the others’ insomnia.  Foggy’s nightmares weren’t going away, but he was getting back to sleep faster with company.  Matt chooses a different tactic, “You want to come stay with me for a couple of days?”  
  
            Foggy wants to.  God, he wants to so much that Matt can feel it in his pores.  Foggy can’t say that he wants to, though.  That would be saying too much.  He uses an excuse more tired than either of them, “Would, but I can’t sleep on your couch, man.”  
  
            Matt doesn’t let him off easily, “Well, then, how about I stay with you?  We can…” talk about how we were both tortured?  “…do that _Star Wars_ marathon you were planning.”  
  
            Foggy plays along only too eagerly, “Braid each other’s hair and talk about cute boys?”  
  
            Matt laughs, “Yeah, sure, if that’s what you want to do.”  
   
           Foggy has to think about it.  No matter how carried away he gets with the moment, the excitement always reminds him that they were both very close to dying.  There are injuries in places neither of them knew existed.  Matt wishes he could retract what he said before Foggy turns it down.  Before they try and pretend they can handle this one their own. 

            “Okay,” Foggy agrees. 

            Matt gives a small, tight smile, “Great.”

            Foggy’s heartbeat starts doing funny, worried things, “We should probably get out of here before Karen sees us and drags us out.”  
            “Yeah,” Matt retrieves his cane and briefcase.  He hears Foggy tapping out a text message to her on his phone. 

            He takes Foggy’s arm on his way out the door.  They walk out together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much as I wanted to provide answers at the end of this fic, I chose to avoid closure. Torture comes with all kinds of psychological and emotional ramifications. While I’m all for the boys returning to normal, I wanted to explore their dissatisfaction when neither the law nor vigilantism helps. And since I just reread this sentence, I realized that the torture is just continuing. I might be a bit of a sadist...
> 
> Also, a short note about the dressings on Foggy's fingers: I spoke to my mom, who is an NP, and she thought that they would just splint the hand and thumb. Of course, she may have been trying to get me off the phone as quickly as possible. The short synopsis I gave her of the fic left her disturbed. 
> 
> Happy reading!


	10. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt and Foggy are captured by some underworld cronies looking to catch the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. The irony of the situation is not lost on them. They’re just sorry they can’t let their captors know that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.

* * *

 

Epilogue

 

            Foggy wakes to the sound of his front door closing, to the sounds of Psycho arranging take-out containers on the kitchen counters for dinner. 

            He reaches instinctively for his abdomen, letting his broken fingers rest gently over the bandaged area.  The two pulse together sympathetically.  They’re planning a coup against his analgesics.  A hostile takeover of agony.  Psycho’s going to help them do it.  Foggy just can’t figure out why Psycho’s wearing stilettos.  High heels are an odd choice of footwear for torture.

            The sheets are oddly dry.  Better still, they remain loosely draped over his body, not kicked off in a snarl as is so often the case.  A glance at the clock confirms he napped for six hours.  Matt’s suggestion to slumber party has scared his subconscious into submission for today.  Foggy couldn’t be more thankful.  He sits up and feels halfway human. 

            He can’t shake the surprise at seeing Karen in his kitchen though.  Evidently, Matt’s presence has little bearing on his terrified instincts.  She waves good-naturedly, then places a finger to her lips.  Matt is asleep on the couch, curled up on his side like an exhausted puppy.  He’s kicked his blanket off and wears it as a cape. 

            Foggy tip-toes to the kitchen.  The floorboard creeks.  Both he and Karen flinch.

            Only Matt’s mouth moves, “Relax.  I’ve been awake for a while.”   
  
            “Before I came in?” Karen asks hopefully.

            “…I’ve been awake for a while.”   
  
            Karen sighs apologetically, “Sorry.  I brought dinner though!  Italian!”  Foggy’s stomach growls.  High carbs, dairy, and meat: Karen is a queen.  She is a lifesaver.  She is the sun and the moon and he would marry her right then and there. 

            She trots back into the entryway, struck by another peace offering, “Also, Matt, something arrived for you at the office today.”   
  
            Matt rises slowly on the couch, pain visible on his face from the muscles working in his chest.  He keeps reaching for the once-broken places, the ones that spasm under his t-shirt.  The night has been relegated to muscle memory for him too.  Foggy is reminded that his hand is resting over his stab wound still.  He lowers it, letting the blood drain into his broken fingers. 

            Karen returns with a large rectangle of brown parcel paper tied neatly with twine.  The name and address are written in a coiling script: Matt Murdock, esq.  “It looks like a portrait.  I can’t feel a frame…” she places it in front Matt on the coffee table.  He reaches out with one hand, rubbing for an edge.   

            “There’s a card,” she tears it off, opens it.  “A sympathy card.  No name.”   
            “You order some artwork?”  Foggy asks as Matt begins tearing.  That sounds wrong.  “Not that you’re not allowed to own artwork...”

            Matt’s hand shakes.  He pulls it away, puts it back, continues tearing.  His fake laugh sours the air in the room.  Foggy’s stab wound prickles.  “My place is rather sparse.”    
            “Did you really need to make yourself more irresistible to women?” Foggy laments jokingly.  He wants the levity back. 

            “I’m not trying to impress the pizza guy.”

            The comeback sounds robotic, rehearsed.  It doesn’t belong to Matt at all.  He’s staring with blind eyes into a canvas, world’s away from the conversation.  The vacancy of his expression yields suddenly to horror.  Anger arrives a second later. 

 

* * *

 

            “It’s really…red,” Karen notes. 

            Foggy circles around to get a look.  “It’s _only_ red,” he clarifies.  “Do you know who this is from?”

            The silence in the room hits a deafening pitch several octaves above middle-C.  Matt’s brain pulses different shades of red and her lilting, accented voice narrates each one:  scarlet, crimson, blood, raspberry, violence, passion.  Her fingers on his arm were so strong, unexpected for a woman her size.  She cut f-sharps into the floor with her heels, laying a percussion for Fisk’s entrance into the gallery. 

            He stands up from the couch and moves to the wall, needing to not be near people for a second.  The rapid heartbeats, increased respiration, and tension radiating from Foggy and Karen is distracting his already furious thoughts.  They ask him what’s wrong; Matt doesn’t answer.  He can’t answer.  He’s too busy putting all the pieces into place.  

            “Vanessa Marianna,” Matt says.  “That’s who arranged for us to be captured.”   
  
            Foggy doesn’t buy it.  Neither does Karen, who challenges him, “Fisk’s girlfriend?  The art dealer?”   
  
            “She described this painting to me when I visited her gallery,” Matt can’t bring himself to breathe normally.  He can taste the red in the oils, and every breath tastes like Foggy dying in the dark.

            “She might have told Fisk about it,” Karen offers, still not convinced. 

            He’s right.  He knows he’s right.  “Look, whoever hired us had money and anonymity.  She has both.  Besides,” Matt digs a hand against his formerly broken ribs.  The pressure helps him breathe, communicate.  He hears Foggy’s heart fall in line with his, caught up in how much sense it makes, “Fisk wouldn’t have let us live.” 

            The atmospheric pressure climbs in the room till all three of them are having trouble breathing.  Matt lets himself sink onto the arm of Foggy’s couch, fighting the urge to tear his skin off.  He can feel particles of red irrigating his bare arms.  Vanessa’s fingers wrapping round his bicep to wander him through her gallery get confused with Baritone clipping off his fingernails. 

            He turns towards Foggy, whose heart has entered an enraged death march.  “She is going down,” Foggy declares, “but first-“  
  
            “I don’t think I’m hungry anymore,” Karen sighs.  She lays the painting down on the coffee table.  Matt can hear her rubbing the red off her hands onto her skirt. 

            Foggy is pacing, energized, “Good.  I’m not hungry either.  I was going to say: first, we’re taking this painting up onto the roof and burning it,” and as if that’s not enough of an exorcism, “the card too.”

            “No,” Matt says softly. 

            “You want to keep the blood painting and her sorry-not-sorry-I-paid-to-have-you-tortured card?” Foggy considers this, “Is it so you can shove them up her ass when we drag her to court for all the charges she’s racking up?”

            “In a manner of speaking.  She’s going to need decorations for her cell.  I want to give her something to remember us by.”

            “To remember the devil of Hell’s Kitchen by,” Foggy adds. 

            “The devil’s work,” Matt agrees. 

            Foggy nods determinedly, “Let’s get to it.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a request for a sequel. I can’t say the thought didn’t cross my mind, but I don’t want to commit to it without the time. I think, for now, I’m going to stick to one-shots or short fics to ensure completion. Thank you for the suggestion though!
> 
> Readers, please treat yourselves to something fabulous tonight. You deserve it. Thank you so much for your kind words and your support. Thank you for coming out, for pointing out my flaws, for sharing your stories. I hope you all find stories that you’re looking for! Cheers! Hope it’s nice where you are. See you around the site!


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